


Gone, Baby, Gone

by crinklefries



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 2 fast 2 fuckboy, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe - Future, Crimes & Criminals, Criminal Leader Steve Rogers, Fast Cars, Found Family, Getaway Driver Bucky Barnes, Gun Violence, Heist, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Minor Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov, Sam Wilson in pink fur and excessive gold jewelry, Sexual Tension, Violence, a fast slow-burn, be gay do crimes, ethics in gay crime, everything is neon-colored, fast cars and fast heists, neon noir, ocean's 69, some light sci fi and future tech
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-06-04
Packaged: 2020-03-26 08:54:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 38,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19002502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crinklefries/pseuds/crinklefries
Summary: An entity known only by the name LEVIATHAN finds each of them, sending, initially a solitary text:Our name is LEVIATHAN. We have a job for you. You have three minutes to decide.Well, what’s a group of bored, reckless thrill-seekers with very specific skills and long criminal histories to do? They needed the money and, well, it sounded fun.[or;Steve is the head of a new criminal crew, Bucky is the getaway driver, Sam wears a LOT of bold outfits and gold jewelry, and the rest of the Avengers help too.There's heists and fast cars in a neon-noir setting, but most importantly, Bucky wears a crop top that saysbe gay do crimeand he is, in fact, gay and he does, in fact, do crime. ]





	1. 001.  [ heist 1 ]

**Author's Note:**

> Ahhh thank you and welcome to my contribution to the 2019 Captain America Reverse Big Bang!! 
> 
> This is based on [BuckySnowAngel](https://twitter.com/buckysnowangel)'s _incredible_ neon-noir Bucky art, which I saw and immediately made me think: damn, that is Bucky Barnes and he is absolutely driving a getaway car. Thank you for a wonderful collab, your art (and you) are an absolute DELIGHT.
> 
> This fic nearly killed me to write and I learned a few important things in the process: describing a neon-noir setting is HARD, people who write heists are unparalleled geniuses, and Sam Wilson looks incredible in pink fur and gold rings. 
> 
> A HUGE thank you to [calendulae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/calendulae/pseuds/amsch), who is a beta extraordinaire and also extremely willing to look up neon-noir, futuristic reference pictures at a moment's notice. 
> 
> Additional thanks to: the mods of the RBB for a great event (as always), and also to: literally every single person who listened to me complain, ad nauseam, about this fic. You're all real ones.
> 
> Anyway, please enjoy the following, which is, in part, Baby Driver and, in part, The Italian Job, and in part, Ocean's 8, especially the really gay portions.

 

  
  
[ ... ]

> | [00:23] **FROM: _LEVIATHAN_**  
>  |  
>  | 17 forest ave, greenhaven, rye, ny  
>  | 9 pm
> 
> | [00:23] **FROM: _LEVIATHAN_**  
>  |  
>  | 30 minute window
> 
> | [00:24] **FROM: _LEVIATHAN_**  
>  |  
>  | dodge charger, hellcat  
>  | black  
>  | outside the garage, 8:30 pm
> 
> | [00:24] **FROM: _LEVIATHAN_**  
>  |  
>  | _has shared a pin_
> 
> | [00:30] **TO: _LEVIATHAN_**  
>  |  
>  | ok  
>   
> 
> [ _pin has expired_ ]

[ ... ]

**001\. [ 17 forest ave, greenhaven, rye, ny ]**

He sets the iPod on the dash. The screen is small, lit brightly in the dark, black text on a white background. The bar along the bottom fills with blue, the time counting down, or up, depending on how you viewed it.

He didn’t, really. That wasn’t his job.

He leans back against the leather seat, the back of his head curving into the headrest. His fingers rest on the steering wheel and they move along with the rest of him. The thump of a bass, a spike of treble. It’s the dark of night, the engine cut, the headlights off.

Two earbuds in, sound spilling, ebbing through him. He had nerves once, but now he’s that space between two beats, the jump in blood from one sound to the next. His shoulders move to the music, his foot tapping against the brake pedal without any conscious acknowledgement on his part.

In front of him, framing the steering wheel, peeking out of black, leather driving gloves cut off at the fingers, there’s flesh on side and the ridges of metal on the other.

The moonlight shimmers through the windshield, catches on metal, refracts back into his eyes.

Bucky smiles.

Good thing he has sunglasses.

///

“How much longer?” he asks. His back is pressed against the doorframe, but he looks in over his shoulder. He’s cool in the heat of the moment, but he has to admit there’s something nervy about counting down the clock the way they have.

He looks at his watch, a square screen that lights up with numbers, bright green against black. It’s an older model, too bright in the dark. There’s a scratch across the face of it too and he frowns, taps it with a finger. He needs to get it fixed, maybe with their next—

 **21:54** , it gleams brightly.

“Six minutes until,” he says and this time he can’t really hide how tight his voice has gone.

“Would be quicker if someone could shut the fuck up,” Natasha growls.

“Could be worse,” a voice comes from next to her. Natasha is crouched on the ground, eye-to-eye with the vault, one ear against the cool gunmetal, her hand at the dial. Above her, Sam holds a flashlight, shining down into the general area.

“Could be better,” Natasha grunts back.

“No need for that,” Steve mutters. He shifts the rifle from one shoulder to the other. It was all a bit heavy-handed, but this job left no room for error. Personally, he would have preferred glocks, but try telling Tony you wanted to run a job without the tech he personally assigns. Still, cut off rifles are a bit tall to handle a few uptight billionaires.

“Can you both just, shut up?” Natasha asks and this time she’s not so polite.

Steve’s nerves are getting the better of him.

He shifts from one foot to the other and looks out onto the hallway. It’s still clear, the long corridor shadowed, except for the end, where squares of white moonlight are cast through the high windows, bright against the black and white tiled floor.

 _“You do know you’re on the clock right?”_   a voice buzzes into his ears and he hears both Natasha and Sam lightly curse from the room.

“No, Stark,” Steve says through gritted teeth. “That had escaped me.”

 _“A lot of attitude for someone who has four minutes left until every siren in the tri-state area goes off.”_   In retrospect, it had been a mistake to let Tony into their ears.

 _Take upgraded communications equipment_ , they said.

 _It’ll be fun_ , they said.

The proverbial ‘they’ had clearly never run a job with Tony Stark on the other end of the fucking communications device. It was like the persistent buzzing of a particularly irritating gnat with control issues.

“Boys,” Natasha says, sweetly. “If you want to get paid, you are going to _shut up_ and let me finish my fucking job. Another word out of any of you and I will slit your throats in your sleep, that is not a threat but a full, sweet promise.”

A pause and then a low crackle over the line.

_“Well that seems a little extreme.”_

Steve doesn’t say anything to that. His heart is beating somewhere in the vicinity of his throat, his adrenaline pumping through every inch of his body. He’s aware. He’s hyper-fucking-aware; it’s crawling across his skin, like a live spider. He tries not to shudder.

He lifts his stupid, fucking, broken old watch again and types out a text.

> | [21:56] **TO: _BARNES_**  
>  |  
>  | running it close. get ready for full throttle.

There’s an answer inside a minute.

> | [21:56] **FROM: _BARNES_**  
>  |  
>  | no one says that
> 
> | [21:56] **FROM: _BARNES_**  
>  |  
>  | ok

The watch flicks off and Steve can feel the seconds tick down somewhere inside of his head. He doesn’t like being late, but that’s not really the issue. He doesn’t feel like being caught with his hands in a billionaire’s home safe. It’s a lot messier when you have to clean blood stains off of white carpet.

Steve is about to lose his fucking chill and scream at all of them when he hears the sound of a hiss and a click and the blessed, beautiful sounds of Natasha gloating quietly, in the only way Natasha knows how. His teeth, which he hadn’t realized he had been clenching, loosen, the tension on his shoulders lifting, if barely.

Then—

“ _Bad news, team,_ ”  Tony’s voice comes, sharp over the line. “ _Our favorite philanthropist is a minute early. T-minus ninety seconds until he pulls up the drive. Get the loot and get out. Fast._ ”

“Fuck,” Natasha grunts, from near the safe.

“Motherfucker,” Sam says with a sigh. He leans over the top and then, looking mildly concerned, switches his flashlight off.

“Don’t worry,” Steve says, grimly. “This is why they pay us the big bucks.”

By us, he means him and Sam.

And by they, he meant—well, he’s not sure.

“Time to go, handsome,” Natasha says, patting Steve’s chest and sliding out of the room with her small, black backpack slid over her petite shoulders again. It sits heavier than it did before.

“Sam,” Steve grunts, his adrenaline spiking, and Sam nods at him.

The vault behind them is shut again, sealed securely. They close the door and run.  
  
  
Natasha’s at the back door, turning the handle before Steve thinks to warn her.

“ _Nat!_ ” he yells, too late.

Within a second, the alarm goes up, a siren so loud, it shrieks, piercing the air, jarring into the place where Steve’s chest was already reacting to everything in hyperdrive. Once upon a time, it would have knocked him over sideways. Good thing he’s grown about a foot and a half and gained a hundred pounds since then.

“ _Motherfucker!_ ” Sam shouts again.

Steve doesn’t wait. He shoves Natasha and Sam out the door before doubling back, down the hallway to where he had passed the alarm security before. Bracing himself, he takes the butt of his rifle and smashes it in.  
  
  
Steve doesn’t know who the fuck is employing them, but whoever _they_ are, they were going to pay him and they were going to pay him good.

///

The thing about being the getaway driver was this: he waited in the car, setting the music on his iPod to the right song. The right song was key, he had learned that the hard way, on the dime of a different employer. Pick the wrong song, the wrong beat, and everything was off—the tempo of the job, the rhythm of the night. If it ended too quickly, you were fucked. If it ended too late, you were even more fucked.

Everything was timed, to a second. No one else really understood, but he did. He felt that in his fucking soul, the notes embedding time into him on a cellular level, his mitochondria ready to flick on the ignition at the word.

He waits and he taps his fingers on top of the steering wheel.

He looks at the messages on his phone and smiles; a crooked, pleased thing.  
  
  
When the siren goes off, he hears it, because he has his earbuds in, but he’s not fucking deaf.

He looks at the dark mansion towering behind him, just up the hill, beyond a wrought iron gate that was meant to be security, but in a half-hearted way, like seasoned criminals with half a mind and a pair of bolt cutters couldn’t case the place and leave the back door open for their escape. It’s the neon-lit, fast-paced, fluorescent future and no one’s got a second thought for things like clever criminal enterprises.

He looks over his sunglasses and raises a single eyebrow.

They come barreling toward him, like three bats out of hell, and it would be kind of funny if it didn’t get right to the meat of him, the vein throbbing at his neck, the adrenaline spike, the heady, bloodrush. Some synth surges in the background, distantly, through his earbuds, and he nearly laughs. It’s like—God, a drug, or something.

He’s not high. He doesn’t need to be.

The doors wrest open and Romanoff and Wilson throw themselves into the back seat, hissing and panting.

Next to him, Rogers opens the door and slides in, all two hundred and something pounds of solid muscle that can barely be restrained by the thin and sorry excuses for t-shirts he wears, tattoos peeking out from underneath the neckline, not that Bucky’s been looking or anything.

“ _Full throttle_ , Buck,” Steve hisses and Bucky grunts, holds up a finger.

Almost—

“ _Anytime now, sunshine_ ,” Tony’s tinny voice comes out of someone’s earpiece.

No.

Almost—

Bucky bobs his head and he sees headlights coming up the drive on the other side of the billionaire’s recently robbed home.

“ _Now, Barnes_ ,” Romanoff growls from the back seat and Bucky’s not taking orders or nothing, it just so happens that the song hits just the right note, the beat in the back of his throat.

“Don’t say full throttle,” Bucky says to Steve. “And don’t call me that.”

Then, Bucky switches on the ignition, lights the Hellcat up fast and silent, rams the stick shift forward, and, music in his head, road in front of him, smile slowly creeping across his face—guns it.

 [ ... ]  


 

  
_art: bucky barnes in a neon-lit setting, sunglasses on, as the getaway driver; art by: buckysnowangel_

[ ... ]


	2. 002. [ HQ ]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An entity known only by the name LEVIATHAN finds each of them, sending, initially a solitary text: _Our name is LEVIATHAN. We have a job for you. You have three minutes to decide._
> 
> Well, what’s a group of bored, reckless thrill-seekers with very specific skills and long criminal histories to do? They needed the money and, well, it sounded fun.

**002\. [ east flatbush, brooklyn, new york ]**

“And another thing,” Stark says, hands slamming down on the metal table. He’s funny when he’s like this, in an aggravating kind of way. He has some contraption around his head, a visual magnifier that looks like half a set of binoculars, or a monocle that slots out into multiple other lenses, each one smaller and more powerful than the last, attached at the back to a black strap that circles his head. Stark says that it magnifies the image of whatever he’s looking at a hundred million times, so that he can visually take apart the very atoms of things, if that’s what he wants, although, personally, Bucky has his doubts it does anything more powerful than make Stark look like an overbearing insect with a single, very large eye.

“How is it possible that he’s still talking about this?” Clint Barton asks. Clint Barton is a blond, partially deaf, demolitions expert, who is mostly a goddamned disaster, but he’s pretty cool and leaves Bucky alone, except for sometimes when he’ll give Bucky a fist bump for a successful job or when he’ll catch Bucky’s eyes when Stark’s going on about something again and then he’ll motion to his hearing aid and very obviously and conspicuously turn it all the way off.

He hasn’t turned off his hearing aid today, but he has rolled his eyes at least seven times. He tips back on his chair, the chair leg scraping against the cold, cement ground. He runs a hand through his hair, which makes it stick up even more. He’s already shaved the sides and the rest of the blond is spiked up as one monolithic structure in the middle.

He looks like a fuckboy, but Bucky guesses they all kind of are, in a roundabout way.

“Nice of you to join us, Barton,” Stark says, even louder than before. “Not that you were any use when it mattered.”

Clint makes some kind of a so-so gesture.

“I had a stomach ache,” he says.

“Bullshit,” Stark gripes. “What if we had needed demos?”

Clint yawns and lets his chair fall back against the ground. It makes a loud clattering sound that sets Bucky’s nerves on edge. He reaches into his pocket and spins his thumb lightly against the dial of his iPod. The song changes into something a little faster. He leans against the concrete pillar behind him, arms crossed at his chest.

“Did you?” Clint asks.

“Well, no,” Tony admits. “But—”

“Did you want to finish your thought, Stark?” Sam asks.

Sam always does this. He sits quietly, patiently even, and then at some point he gets tired of everyone bickering and cuts in, moving the conversation from point z back to point b. Bucky thinks he trusts Sam, because of this.

“What?” Stark splutters and then runs a hand down his face. His fingers drag against his salt-and-pepper beard and when he reaches the bottom, he cups his chin between his index finger and thumb. “Oh right. And _another_ thing. Is there a reason our getaway driver was waiting for us to get caught? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that his entire _employ_ was to, you know, drive and drive fast.”

Bucky, who’s been following all of this in a half-daze, frowns.

Everyone is suddenly looking at him.

There’s Stark hovering over the table, Clint in his chair, Sam sprawled across the only single sofa, Natasha sitting on top of one of the long, metal tables, her hands curled over the edges, legs swinging under, and her red hair in a single braid over her shoulder. There’s Bruce, doing whatever Bruce does at his computer bank, and Steve—also leaning against a pillar of his own, arms crossed at his chest, although how his body could fit both his arms and his chest into the same general area is not a mystery Bucky has solved, not that he’s spent much time trying to solve it or anything.

“Earth to Barnes,” Stark says and snaps his fingers a few times.

Bucky turns to look at Tony, blinks at him slowly and then points at himself as though to say—who _me_?

“I know you’re more than a pretty face, sunshine,” Stark says and snaps some more. Bucky’s still wearing his sunglasses, so Tony doesn’t see the way his eyes narrow, like Bucky couldn’t take his brittle, overactive fingers and snap them in his metal hand.

Bucky doesn’t talk much, really. It’s not that he’s not capable of it, but he usually finds opening his mouth invites trouble and Bucky’s never had a problem finding more interesting ways of inviting trouble. He calculates all of the ways to not answer and finds the only way he can.

“What do you want?” he asks.

“An explanation would be nice,” Tony says. “A complete sentence. I know your entire aesthetic is leather and metal and monosyllabic retorts, but I need to know that we can count on you. So what was that, back there?”

Bucky, as a rule, also doesn’t explain himself. He finds he has no reason to; he doesn’t owe that part of himself to anyone, least of all to some former billionaire’s son with something to prove and a grudge to burn. He’s here to do a job and to get paid for it. The whys and hows of it are for him to know.

“The job needed a driver,” Bucky says, just to piss Stark off. “So I drove.”

“Bullshit, you drove!” Tony splutters, slamming both of his hands against the metal tabletop again.

“I mean he did drive, factually,” Sam mutters, so quietly that only Steve and Bucky seem to hear. Steve’s mouth curves into a smile, while Tony’s eyes turn a little crazy.

“What was that hesitation?” he says, voice rising. “The marks were coming up the hill, another few seconds and they would have _seen_ —”

“They didn’t,” Bucky says.

That stops Tony mid-rant, mouth slightly agape.

“What?”

“They didn’t,” Bucky repeats. He sides, runs his flesh hand down the arm of his soft, leather jacket. “They didn’t see us.”

“Because of luck!” Tony says, turning red in the face.

“No, Stark,” Bucky says slowly. “Because I didn’t want them to see us.”

Tony looks a little purple around the edges and takes in a deep breath, undoubtedly to yell again. The rest of the room looks less tense than bored, truth be told. They’re a pretty new crew, but alliances are forged on similar experiences and each and every one of them have already had at least one experience with Tony Stark. That was to say that Clint, Sam, and Steve were watching the proceedings with half-interested expressions, while Natasha was examining her nails. Bruce was typing behind his computer bank again.

“I know how to do my job and I know how to do it well,” Bucky says and pushes off his pillar. “You don’t tell me how to do my job and I won’t tell you how to do yours.”

“That’s beside the point!” Tony insists. “You _couldn’t_ do my job!”

See, Bucky? Bucky smokes. It’s not the best habit and his mother, God rest her soul, would have an absolute shock if she ever saw him doing it, but he smokes and shit like this is primarily why.

“All right,” Bucky says slowly. He gets the car keys out of the pocket of his leather jacket and throws them across the room. They hit the metal table, bounce once, and skid across the top to a noisy halt in front of Tony. “You drive, then.”

Tony looks at the keys for a moment, his mouth twisted, as though it’s physically paining him to not be able to say anything scathing in response. It’s only at this that Natasha lets out a long breath of exhalation.

“This is stupid,” she says. Then she tilts her head back. Her braid slides off her shoulder and bounces against her back. Bucky watches Clint watch her. “Banner.”

“Leave me out of this,” Bruce says, muttering and typing.

“Not that,” Natasha says. “I don’t care about whatever this is. The loot.”

“Banknotes,” Bruce says. He doesn’t even look up from his screen. It’s the future everyone’s always waited for and there are still screens, go figure. “I’ve transmitted them to our, ah, employer.”

“And?” Natasha’s not really patient even in the best of circumstances, and the entire crew has been kind of antsy since the end of the job. Bucky can feel it too, an excess energy making the palms of his hands itch.

“We’ll get our cuts soon,” Bruce says.

That’s not exactly information, but it’s about as much as they have to go on. That’s not unusual, here.

After all, it’s only their second job together and all the information they have they got over text message, from a number no one had known, and a name no one had heard of.

///

Here’s what happens: they’re given an offer they can’t refuse.

An entity known only by the name LEVIATHAN finds each of them, sending, initially a solitary text: _Our name is LEVIATHAN. We have a job for you. You have three minutes to decide._

Well, what’s a group of bored, reckless thrill-seekers with very specific skills and long criminal histories to do? They needed the money and, well, it sounded fun.

LEVIATHAN gathered a crew of the underworld’s most promising and talented criminals, bringing them together with one purpose in mind: to pull off a series of dangerous and audacious jobs and reap the profits in excess.  
  


> First: **STEVEN GRANT ROGERS** , age 34, formerly of the ‘COMMANDOS’, a local Brooklyn ring, comprised largely of former military, para-military, and ex-police personnel, aligned heavily with the anarchist movement, although official political affiliation unclear. Hot-tempered and impulsive, with tendency toward leadership. Mostly involved in robbing billionaires and corporate institutions. Arrested half a dozen times for vandalism and property destruction, although is too good at slipping his hands into an unsuspecting rich man’s pocket and sliding out his credit card to ever be caught for what he’s _really_ good at. Thief/leader.
> 
> Then, **SAMUEL THOMAS WILSON** , age 32, a fast-talking, city-slick criminal who bumps first and apologizes later. Background mostly upstanding, to a certain point, until he joined the Eagles, a sub-branch of the Air Force, lost his partner, and then, probably, his mind. Turns out, the straight and narrow wasn’t for him. Good at robbing casinos blind and having them thank him for his efforts. On the ground/hustler.
> 
> Next, **ANTHONY “TONY” STARK** , age 41, son of The Howard Stark, CEO of Stark Industries. Got himself disinherited in his twenties due to a bad drug problem and somehow spending a quarter of his family fortune over the course of a year. Has spent the intervening years building and distributing highly illicit technology to the Underground and to rival criminal organizations. Certainly involved in a wide-reaching scam of his own creation. Tech genius.
> 
> **DR. ROBERT BRUCE BANNER** , age 40, former MIT professor with seven doctorates to his name. Got fired for selling advanced, confidential research to the underground. Single-handedly hacked into MIT’s financial institution and drained five years of deposited endowments in a fit of anger. Money was never traced to any of his accounts. Never caught. Known for his temper and for being the best hacker on the Grid. Hacker.
> 
> **NATASHA ROMANOVA** , age unknown, background unknown. Russian in origin, pinged the radar in the United States ten years ago when someone was rumored to have broken into the United States Bullion Depository. Unconfirmed involvement, but a picture of a single black widow spider was left behind in front of the robbed vault. Vault technician/code breaker.
> 
> **CLINTON “CLINT” FRANCIS BARTON** , age 35, grew up on a ranch in Iowa. Attended the University of Nebraska for three semesters before leaving mysteriously in the middle of the night and never returning. Western wing of the Chancellor’s campus mansion blew up that night, coinciding with his disappearance. Took a bus to NYC; accidentally joined [redacted] Brighton Beach crime family and stayed. Partial hearing loss. Demolitions expert.
> 
> And finally, their getaway driver, **JAMES BUCHANAN “BUCKY” BARNES** , age 34, unknown background. Known as the “Winter Soldier” in the Queens street racing circuit. Has never lost. Metal arm from an unknown accident. Getaway driver. The best there is.

///

Stark finally gets bored harassing Bucky, which is just as well because Bucky’s not paying attention to the physical manifestation of complete neuroses anymore. Steve is leaning over Natasha, looking at some blueprint, his arms stretched taut, veins standing out against pale skin, a light smattering of downy hair covering the length of them. His hands brace the entirety of his weight. His ass is just there, for the looking, and Bucky’s bored anyway.

He switches what he’s listening to from something with synth to something with more of a bass. He’s not subtle as he traces Steve with his eyes, starting at the curve of his shoulders and sliding down the muscles of his back, to that little dip in his lower back, melting into the swell of an ass that, Bucky could, pardon his thoughts, happily bite into.

He’s only slightly disgusted at himself for the thought. Then again, no one forced Steve to wear pants that someone’s going to have to cut him out of.

“You’re starting to drool,” Sam says, next to him.

He isn’t, but Bucky takes a moment to make sure anyway.

“Don’t you have something to be doing?” Bucky asks, once he’s determined his chin to be dry.

“No,” Sam says. “Waiting to get cashed out.”

“For doing what?” Bucky asks with a snort. He fiddles with the zipper at the bottom of his jacket. “Holding a light up for Romanoff?”

“I’m sorry, tell me what good you are on the ground in a job,” Sam says. He’s still languidly sprawled on the couch, one leg on the ground, the other spread across the cushion next to him. He’s texting someone. His rings catch the harsh fluorescent light and reflect black into Bucky’s eyes.

Bucky blinks at that and adjusts his position on his pillar. Wilson is always wearing more jewelry than someone who passes through metal detectors with some frequency strictly needs. He has thin rings lining his fingers, silver cuffs and linked gold bands on his wrists, and a small, gold nose ring that’s linked to a small cuff on his ear with a delicate, gold chain. He has small diamonds at each of his earlobes and a small, silver stud under his bottom lip. It’s not Bucky’s preferred aesthetic, but he has to admit it’s not the worst on the other man.

Sam removes and adjusts it all intermittently anyway; a nose chain is just as good a way to get identified on a job as having an ass that’s identifiable in three different states.

“Are you thinking about his ass again?” Sam interrupts his thoughts.

“Are you trying to kinkshame me?” Bucky asks. His fingers itch, somehow, an unidentifiable need to be moving sinking into the base of his spine. He wishes he had a cigarette. “That’s homophobic.”

“I can’t be homophobic, I have a gay friend,” Sam says and jerks his head at Steve.

Bucky—well, this was probably Sam’s intention all along, but that catches him off guard.

“Gay?” he asks. He lifts his thumb to his bottom lip and drags it down in contemplation.

“Something like that,” Sam says, tilting his head back so he can stare at Bucky upside down. “You into labels?”

“I’m into—” Bucky starts and stops. There’s no good way to answer that. Dick, sure, but he’s not exclusive. He just wants to blow off steam, sometimes, and other times, well, the body wants what the body wants. “Whatever. Interesting information.”

“I bet,” Sam says with a smirk that’s so aggravating that Bucky pushes off his position on the pillar.

“I need a smoke,” he says and leaves.  
  
  
It’s not really a safehouse, so much as a headquarters for—whatever it is that they are. Bucky wouldn’t call them a gang, really, and organization is too big. A crew, maybe. A specific, hand-picked crew for an undetermined number of jobs, for an unidentified purpose, but it puts money in his bank account so he guesses he doesn’t care that much.

It’s an empty warehouse in the middle of a neighborhood that used to be something, before time left its mark, taking sparks of life and leaving hollowed husks of former industry behind. There are buildings squeezed in on either side, barbed wire and shuttered windows where there used to be restaurants and cafes, a sad grocery store, an automechanic’s garage, and a large, empty brick building with half of the letters missing from an old department store sign. The letters that remain hang, half-askew, the bright, cyan lettering flickering sadly, accompanied by a buzzing sound that fills the quiet night air.

It’s Brooklyn, but it’s also New York City, in a greater sense—concrete sidewalks slick with rain and the bright colored reflections of what the city used to be, before time and corporations carved it up, ravaged it and left it for dead.

LEVIATHAN had told them each to meet there, in the middle forgotten Brooklyn, sent a text containing a set of numbers that could only have been the code to break inside the building. Inside, they had found each other other, justifiably wary, with a communications dock in the middle of the large, cement room. Stark had been the one to step forward and press what didn’t appear to be a button and then the message had been cast up, read by a distorted voice. An invitation—an opportunity.

Bucky stands against the building, wrestling a cigarette out of one jacket pocket and a lighter from the other. There were easier ways to smoke now—some less dangerous, some more; all a little pill here, a little cyber-technology there. Bucky’s never been fond of vaping or simulation tabs himself. Call him old fashioned, but he likes the feeling of nicotine and tar settling into his lungs.

He takes a drag, cupping the light against the slight Brooklyn wind.

“Hey,” a deep voice comes from beside him and it’s not really his fault it goes to his gut the way it does.

“Hey,” Bucky says back. He removes the cigarette from his lips and blows a ring of smoke into the air.

“You left,” Steve says.

“Needed a smoke,” Bucky replies. He turns his head and looks at Steve, who’s hesitating in the open doorway, as though looking for an invitation.

Bucky’s not really in the business of giving invitations, so he raises an eyebrow instead. Steve gives him a half-wry smile and lets the door close behind him.

“Need company?” Steve asks.

“No,” Bucky says, immediately. Then amends, “Depends on the company.”

“I got one in mind,” Steve says. He takes a spot on the wall, a few feet down from Bucky and Bucky turns his head to follow him.

“Wonder who it could be,” Bucky says.

Steve gives him a soft grin at that. The breeze ruffles his gold-blond hair, the moonlight catching in it.

“That was a good night,” Steve says. “Decent payout.”

Bucky shrugs.

“I guess,” he says. He’s had bigger jobs. Had smaller ones too. “Better than with—”

Bucky’s run the circuit for longer than LEVIATHAN knows. He’s not stupid, he knows Steve was with the COMMANDOS; he left his mark on jobs all over town and Bucky, well, he ran into some of them himself.

“Yeah,” Steve says and it’s not offended. He folds his enormous arms behind him, cushioning them between the cement wall and his back. He has one leg up, boots against the wall too, bent at the knee. He looks contemplative.

“You smoke?” Bucky asks.

Steve looks over.

“Couldn’t before,” he says and gestures vaguely at his monolith of a torso. “Asthma. Now—every once in a while.”

Bucky offers the lit cigarette over and Steve smiles as he takes it. Their fingertips brush and that goes to Bucky’s gut too, a keen, physical kind of hunger.

“Thanks,” Steve says. Bucky watches him put his mouth around the end where Bucky’s mouth had just been, take in a long drag, and then pull it back out. He holds it between the index and middle fingers of his right hand. “And thanks for earlier, for driving.”

Bucky’s the one to smile this time, although he hides it under a grunt.

“Don’t gotta thank me for my job, Rogers,” he says.

“Well, I’m thanking you anyway,” Steve says. It’s almost stubborn and Bucky can imagine him—a piece of shit little punk with a death wish when he was younger, or even when he was older, leading the COMMANDOS with that same defiant expression in his eyes, that hard furrow between his brows.

“Think we’ll get another job?” Bucky asks. He motions for the cigarette and Steve passes it back to him.

Steve shrugs.

“I don’t know why they’d waste time getting us all together if you didn’t have more than two jobs,” he says. “Seems like you could just ruffle up some bankers and take their wallets instead.”

“Not everyone’s a pickpocket,” Bucky suddenly grins.

That makes Steve laugh. It’s a light, casual thing, meaningless, probably, but it still curls in Bucky’s stomach.

“It’s not that hard,” Steve says, a light a little like the devil gleaming in his eyes. “I could teach you.”

Bucky smiles around the cigarette in his mouth. He takes it out and Steve’s still watching him, closely.

“Maybe I’ll let you,” Bucky says.

The air hangs between them, a little heavier than before, but not in an uncomfortable way. If Bucky lets his fingers brush against Steve’s again as he hands the fag back over or if Steve clearly runs his eyes up and down Bucky’s body, well they don’t really acknowledge it.

It’s not an unpleasant sensation to feel his throat go dry.

“You get other offers?” Bucky asks, after a bit.

Steve scratches his neck, eyeing the empty street in front of them.

“A few,” he says.

“Why this one?” Bucky asks.

Steve shrugs, and then says, “It was the most interesting.”

That makes Bucky grin all over again.

“You mean the most dangerous,” he says.

Steve’s mouth evens out into a thin line—a barely repressed smile.

“We don’t know that,” he says. What he means, Bucky can read is: _yes_. He likes that. He likes it when they’re as stupid as he is.

“I saw you,” Bucky says. “When you were with—”

Steve turns to look at him, surprise flickering across his features.

“I didn’t see you,” he says.

“Maybe you just don’t remember,” Bucky smiles wryly.

The look Steve gives him is a beat too long, a shade too intense. God, it makes everything in him twist.

“I would have remembered,” Steve says and Bucky swallows, thickly.

He turns his head back toward the street.

“You like that we don’t know,” Bucky says. “You like the thrill of it.”

Steve doesn’t say anything for a moment. When he offers his hand, Bucky passes the cigarette back to him.

“I like it for now,” Steve says and sucks on the cigarette. “We’ll see about later.”  
  
  
He’s to the stub of the cigarette, one drag left, when both of their watches go off. Bucky looks down at his—some smart watch that Stark had given them, wired with something or something, on the eve of their first job. There’s an alert on it.

> | **ACCOUNT ALERT  
> ** | **  
> **| ** _DEPOSIT_ : $150,000**

  
“How about that,” Steve says. “Pay day.”

Bucky smiles grimly, finishes his cigarette, and grounds the stub under the heel of his boot.

[ … ]


	3. 003. [ heist 2 ]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Sounds boring,” Bucky says, through a half-smile. “Where’s the fun in being prepared for a little chaos?” 
> 
> Steve’s eyes shift over to the other side of the car, where Sam’s emerged. All of the heads, which had been turned toward Natasha, are now watching their city slicker. 
> 
> “You can’t prepare for chaos, Buck, that’s the point,” Steve says. He winks and steps away. Before he offers Natasha his other arm, he moves past Bucky, leaning in, mouth scratching his ear again. “And you always look pretty, sweetheart.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you're ready for Sam Wilson to be serving some LOOKS. The Outfit in Question inspired by [this gorgeous](https://twitter.com/itscinni/status/1113487679059001349) Sam Wilson fanart by [itscinni](https://twitter.com/itscinni)!

 [ … ]

> | [23:46] **FROM: _LEVIATHAN_**  
>  |  
>  | empire city casino  
>  | saturday, may 2
> 
> | [23:46] **FROM: _LEVIATHAN_**  
>  |  
>  | vault passwords change at 7:23 pm
> 
> | [23:47] **FROM: _LEVIATHAN_**  
>  |  
>  | mitsubishi genesis evolution xv  
>  | white  
>  | aqueduct race track, 4:30 pm pick up

[ … ]

**003\. [ empire city casino, yonkers, ny ]**

**may 2; 5:00 pm.**

The Evo XV runs smooth as butter, responsive to the slightest of touches, switching from 0 to 100 in three seconds flat, with an engine that purrs just loud enough to be distantly satisfying and no louder. Sometimes he feels connected to the road, the traction between the ground and the wheels a second heartbeat in his chest. He would never admit to feeling heady at the scent of burnt rubber, but it’s not an unpleasant smell.

He skids to a smooth and complete stop three blocks away from the warehouse.

He scrolls through his iPod and waits. His watch flashes a minute later.  
  


> | [17:01] **FROM: _ROGERS_**  
>  |  
>  | be there in in a few. nat says she didn’t kill twelve russian operatives to go into a job  
>  | with ‘unkempt’ hair.
> 
> | [17:01] **FROM: _ROGERS_**  
>  |  
>  | not sure if she was joking about the russians. definitely wasn’t joking  
>  | about the hair.  
>   
> 

Bucky can’t help but half smile at that. He types out a response on his smartphone and sends the reply. He turns the music up louder in his ears, reclines in his leather seat, and taps out the beat on top of the steering wheel.

 

///

**five days earlier.**

“Okay, here’s what we do,” Steve says.

They’re gathered in the middle of the warehouse, LEVIATHAN’s instructions pulled up on a floating black screen with dark green neon lettering, cast somewhere above the center of the long metal table. On a second floating screen, in bright neon blue, is schematics of the casino, while on the table itself, there’s a three dimensional, in-depth hologram of the full building.

The crew stares at him: Sam next to him, Natasha leaning against the far corner, arms crossed at her chest, and Clint leaning back in his usual chair. Bruce is hunched over a laptop next to Natasha and Tony is mumbling to himself and walking around the table, examining both the schematics and the hologram with furrowed brows. Bucky is sitting on top of a different table, his hands braced against the edge of the metal, his legs swinging lightly under him. He has his usual leather jacket on, but he’s lost his sunglasses and baseball cap today. He’s pulled his long, brown hair back into a ponytail, so Steve can see a single metal ball at his right tragus. He loses a good ten seconds to staring at it before realizing he has the floor.

Steve looks around at the quickly warming acquaintances surrounding him and feels that same beat of confidence he feels when he slips a hand into someone’s back pocket. He’s never half as thrilled or as assured as when he’s at the head of the table, about to start something new.

“Before you go onto the floor, you’re chipped with a bracelet,” Steve says. He nods at Tony, who scrolls through something on his watchcaster. An image of the microchipped bands projects out, floating in between them. “The chips are linked to your radial signature and connected to the casino’s vault and your bank account. You win on the floor, you accrue money from the vault. It hangs in your band, like a kind of...digital banking limbo. You lose on the floor, and it pulls money from your bank account instead, stores it in the chip. When you leave the casino, you tap the chip against a kiosk and it unhooks from your wrist. The transaction finishes, for better or worse.”

Tony scrolls through his watch again and this time the image of the band disappears, replaced with a hologram of the miniature casino. It deconstructs immediately, zooms in on what looks like a vault room.

“It’s all digital currency, which means it’s numbers going up and down in a database. There’s no physical money,” Steve says. Clint raises an eyebrow and smacks his gum loudly. “Welcome to the future. All of the hundreds of millions in the casino database are stored in a series of numbers that are encrypted.”

“We’re stealing encrypted numbers?” Sam asks, looking at the whole set up with a frown.

“We’re breaking into their vault and taking the numbers,” Steve says with a half grin. “We give those to Bruce and—”

“I drain their account,” Bruce says, pushing the glasses up the bridge of his nose. He stretches his arms in front of him and his checkered purple button up shifts up and down on his arms. Bruce Banner is the most unassuming and brutally efficient hacker on the Eastern seaboard and probably a few other seaboards besides. “I can run the decryption and hack into their servers easy. It’s almost insultingly simple. But to do that, I need their serial numbers.”

“Okay,” Natasha says and leans forward with interest. “We need the vault and the numbers. What else?”

“The vault is guarded by three sets of doors and two different security teams working in a tight shift,” Tony says now. He enlarges the image of the vaults and this time there are tiny people patrolling the area in front. “Here’s where it gets tricky. The doors each have retinal scans and codes, which change every day. Unless we figure out which eyeball is the Magic 8 Ball that day, we’re out of luck.”

“So then how do we get in, Stark?” Sam asks. “We gonna cut everyone’s eye out until the doors magically open?”

“Interesting that your mind went immediately to mutilation,” Tony says, squinting at Sam through the hologram. “You got a background in serial killing you left off your CV?”

“A serial killer never tells his secrets,” Sam says with a smirk and raises a finger to his mouth.

Steve rolls his eyes.

“Tony,” he says and the other man flaps his arm in Steve’s general direction.

“You never let me have any fun, Cap,” Tony says. “Anyway, no we’re not plucking eyeballs from anyone’s head. There’s only one real way to get rid of a door you don’t want.”

This time it’s Clint who grins, finally lets the legs of his chair bang down on the ground and leans forward, rubbing his hands together.

“You blow it up!”

“Thanks to our resident pyromaniac, we set off controlled blasts, take the doors off their hinges,” Tony gestures at the hologram and, almost as though reading his mind, the vault disappears and the doors appears, half a foot thick each and steel-inforced, with a scanning panel and no real handles. “Blasts will short-circuit the system, swinging them open. That leaves the—”

“Patrolmen,” Steve interrupts. He nods at the the image and the tiny guards come back. “The patrols run up and down the hallway. There’s a forty five second lag between the time they turn the corner and when they come back to their door. No more, no less. Clint, can you work fast?”

“Just let me near those hinges,” Clint says, his eyes glittering dangerously. “Me and my demos just want to talk.”

“You,” Tony says pointing at him. “Are a madman.”

Clint grins and gives him two thumbs up.

“They come back and I’ll take care of them,” Steve says. “But we don’t want to leave too many bodies behind. We want to get in, get the codes, get out.”

“So where does that leave me?” Natasha asks. She flicks her braid over her shoulder and Clint beams at her.

“There’s a big vault door at the end,” Tony says. “Can’t blast the hinges off there, unfortunately. The entire door is pressurized, set up to anticipate these kinds of—” He waves his hands vaguely in the air. “—shenanigans. See these glass ballasts, here and here? There’s a careful pressure balance. An explosive or anything similar will cause them to crush internally and the entire door will lock down. That’ll be the end of this merry little endeavor.”

“Damn,” Sam mutters. He’s rubbing his arms, but looking forward now, interested. “So, Nat’s gotta break it?”

“There’s a four digit dial out front. Romanoff, you figure that out, and someone—maybe muscles over here—” Tony jerks his head at Steve, who blinks at him, “—turns the big, six foot dial. Get in and there’s a cage door. Easy enough to melt through the lock.”

“Nat,” Steve says, turning to Natasha and she raises an eyebrow at him. “The codes are inside a safe inside the vault. So you have to codebreak twice, but time’s tight. The guards have to call in to a number once every ten minutes to assure there’s nothing wrong. It’s voice-signature matched. Tony’s tech can’t replicate anyone’s voice without a thirty second sample to lock onto, meaning—”

“Unless you keep a guard talking that long, there’s no way to replicate their voice signature for the job,” Natasha nods. “So I have ten minutes to get through an unbreakable vault door and an unbreakable safe inside and get back out.”

It hasn’t taken too many jobs for Steve to learn to trust Natasha Romanoff implicitly. She doesn’t always say much, but actions speak louder anyway, and he’s watched her break into vaults and safes on a two minute time crunch without breaking a single sweat. Sometimes, he thinks she must have vodka where her blood should be.

“That gonna be a problem for you?” Steve asks, eyebrow raised.

She flicks a smile at him, as though she knows what he’s thinking, and he gives her a thin one in return.

“Give me a challenge next time,” she says.

Tony snorts and the hologram zooms out from the vault room and corridors, back to the casino at large. It’s a large, glittery, neon-colored nightmare of a futuristic structure. It kinda reminds Steve of a dinosaur spine, lit up with multi-colored strobe lights.

“There’s no signal down in the vault room,” Bruce says and turning to Natasha. “Get upstairs and send me the codes. I’ll take it from there.”

“What about him?” Sam asks, jerking his head at Bucky. Bucky, who’s been watching the instructions with an inscrutable expression on his face, blinks.  
  
“If all goes well,” Tony says. “Buckingham over here will just be the best-dressed chauffeur in Yonkers.”

“Uh huh,” Sam says. “And if it doesn’t?”

“Then he’s a chauffeur with some gas to burn,” Tony says.

Sam rolls his eyes and Bucky looks at the ceiling with a thin smile.

“And what about me, Stark?” Sam finally asks.

Tony grins and all of the screens vanish.

“Now why didn’t you start with that, bird man?”

Sam raises an eyebrow, but Steve catches Bucky’s eyes. Bucky gives him a half-grin and Steve is hard-pressed to smother his own smile, a thrill running through stomach. 

///

**may 2; 5:30 pm.**

The car is a silent hum as it pulls up to the glass front doors, the late afternoon sun gleaming off of bright white curves and a chrome spoiler that reflects spots of light back into the eyes of anyone caught staring. Above them, the curved glass and metal structure of the casino’s dramatic entrance criss-crosses through the sky, thick silver and glass lines sloping up above them and curving back down many feet to the side of them. In between the entrance and the other side of the structure, there’s room for half a dozen cars to pull up comfortably side-by-side.

It’s 5:30 in the afternoon and the whole thing is lit up in a bright, neon blue. He gets out of the car and the neon beams shift colors, melting from bright blue to bright green and then to bright yellow, with thirty second intervals in between. A pipeline of lights frame the entire, crystalline carport and then again the outline to the glass entrance. These light up white-gold, casting the structure with the bright, glittering feeling of futurism and opulence.

Bucky approaches the back door first and opens it, standing back and catching the eyes of an attendant dressed head to toe in a bright silver suit, communication tab blinking conspicuously behind his ear. The attendant inclines his bald head, barely, and behind him, two armed security guards shift to the side as a woman with dark hair and a glittering gold fur coat steps through the full-body scanner.

The sound of heels against pavement redirects his attention.

Natasha emerges from the car, four inch, red-bottomed Louboutins first, then the rustle of a gown sliding carefully from the inside to the ground after her. Bucky offers his arm and Natasha takes it with a smile, her lips bright red, half of her red curls pinned to one side of her head, and the rest brushing the top of her bare shoulders. She has two diamond and jade earrings at her ears and an elegant diamond necklace at her throat, with a jade teardrop resting in between her collarbones. Her sleeveless green dress, cut low in the front, hugs all of the right places. She turns the eyes of the attendant, the guards, and half of the remaining guests emerging from their cars.

She takes Bucky’s arm and he helps gather the bottom of her dress from getting dirty against the ground.

“Is this what not calling attention to yourself looks like?” Natasha murmurs.

“I’m not the one they’re looking at, babe,” Bucky says lowly in return.

That seems to amuse Natasha, because when Clint emerges behind her, in his nice black tuxedo, with the light purple t-shirt underneath and the pristine white sneakers he’ll scuff in the next hour with ease, she leans in to his ear and says something that makes his whole face light up.

Bucky closes the door behind them. He feels a large hand against his lower back before he can turn.

“Counting on you,” Steve murmurs in Bucky’s ear. His voice is low, his breath ghosting against Bucky’s jaw. It slides through him like a spark he swallows, the hint of heat settling into his stomach.

“To look pretty?” Bucky says.

“To get us out of here,” Steve says with a smile. “When it all goes south.”

“Who says it’s going south?” Bucky asks.

“Plan for the worst and enjoy the best,” Steve says.

Bucky turns and he finds him adjusting his blue suit. He’s wearing an expensive black button up shirt underneath, with glittering silver cufflinks at his wrists, and black shoes so shiny Bucky can see his image in them. The suit jacket is unbuttoned. So is the top of his shirt. His beard is neatly groomed and his blond hair is just combed over enough to look nice and just unkempt enough to look slightly like a prestigious fuckboy. He looks like luxury and smells like it too. It’s doing unbelievable things to Bucky’s lizard brain.

“Sounds boring,” Bucky says, through a half-smile. “Where’s the fun in being prepared for a little chaos?”

Steve’s eyes shift over to the other side of the car, where Sam’s emerged. All of the heads, which had been turned toward Natasha, are now watching their city slicker.

“You can’t prepare for chaos, Buck, that’s the point,” Steve says. He winks and steps away. Before he offers Natasha his other arm, he moves past Bucky, leaning in, mouth scratching his ear again. “And you always look pretty, sweetheart.”

That goes straight _somewhere_ , but Bucky doesn’t have a chance to answer.

He swallows a curse and turns, getting back in the car to park it.

He doesn’t look back, but he still feels the friction of bristles against the soft of his skin and the simmering heat in the pit of his stomach long after the dice has been rolled.

///

**may 2; 6:30 pm.**

“That’s a mighty lucky hand you have there,” the dealer says. She’s a woman in a white button-up and a vest, bangs cut across the front, and dark hair in a ponytail.

Sam leans forward, with a grin. His pink fur brushes against the card table. Under, he wears nothing but a body chain, fine links of gold threading across at his neck, down his chest and looping low around his waist. At each of these intersections is clusters of diamond shaped into small flowers. On his fingers are his fine gold and silver rings, at his wrists, more threads of delicate chain. He’s wearing his nose ring with chain attached to his ear cuff. He has on silver eyeliner and glitter highlighting his cheekbones.

He looks every bit the lush, over-indulgent, billionaire’s sweetheart and he has the smile to boot.

The dealer isn’t the only one staring.  
  
“What can I say?” he says. “I got one lady and her name is Luck.”

The dealer raises an eyebrow, but only slightly. Mostly, there’s that tug at the corner of her mouth that shouldn’t be there, the soft way she eyes him as she slides two cards across the green to his hand.

Sam picks up the two cards, one at a time, smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Lady come to play?” the dealer asks.

Sam sets down the two cards. A King and an Ace.

“Lady came to stay,” he says and slides forward, offers his black bracelet up to the dealer. She takes the metal wand from her vest pocket and taps it against the band.

The digital counter slides up.

$15,000, the bracelet lights up in white numerals on the dark screen.

Not bad for an hour’s worth of play.

Good, some might say.

Too good, even.

“Another?” the dealer asks, but she’s already shuffling.

Sam leans back and his bangles and chains jangle with him. The black bracelet sits neatly on top.

///

Empire City Casino is the digital, neon fever dream of a decades-old venture capitalist and a corporation that had accrued enough wealth to outstrip the Fortune 500 nearly a century ago. It’s a capitalist’s paradise—an embarrassing, ostentatious, multi-colored display of the extravagant, unbelievable excesses of wealth held by a handful and dangled over the rest. The inside is pillars of lit-up, multicolored crystal palm trees and curved metal architecture stretching from floor to ceiling. There are massive, holographic projections of celebrities, androids, and what looks distinctly like non-human forms, cast along the edges of the different floors. They’re not to be mistaken for the actual androids that wind their way through the gamblers, leaning in at different tables, offering drinks and tickets and, sometimes, a little more.

The casino itself is open and tiered, with levels depending on the starting value of the gambler, the main floor home to plebeians, and the subsequent floors carrying tables and kiosks meant for the more exclusive; those with unlabeled purses and red-bottom shoes, men with diamond cufflinks, and bracelets as black and blank as the black cards in their pockets. Security and glass elevator ports stand in between each level, guarded by passkeys only guards have. Bracelets flicker around the different floors and levels, the sounds a low murmur of voices, of slot machines dinging, of cards being shuffled against table tops and the whir and clacking of roulette tables. The past may leave and the future may come, but one thing remains certain: people love to gamble. It’s a cacophony of colors and sin.

Steve excuses himself from the card table to weave through the crowd to the far end of the floor. His cufflink catches the neon lights and sparkles at his wrists. His band sits, pure black, just in front.  
  
“What can I get you?” the bartender, a woman with half her head shorn and green curls for the rest, nods at him. She’s shaking a drink for another customer, dressed in a black and white suit-vest combination, which is a great contrast to the sleeve tattoo Steve can see crawling out from under her rolled up sleeves.

“Yamakazi 12 year old single malt,” Steve says. “Two fingers neat.”

“I’ll get you next,” the bartender says and moves down the length of the cool blue neon-lit bar to pour the cocktail for a man in a gold suit with a blinking simulation tab under both of his ears.

Someone slides up to Steve’s left. The pressure is so slight against him, he doesn’t even flinch.

“Less than an hour,” Natasha’s voice comes low over the rim of her glass. Steve looks over toward her, lightly. She’s leaning with her back against the bar, a small glass of vodka in her hand.

“How’s it looking?” Steve asks.

Natasha raises an eyebrow, looking out onto the floor. Steve watches the bartender as she pulls out the bottle of whiskey.

“He’s turning eyes,” she says. “Our Falcon is astoundingly good at counting cards.”

“Even better at getting caught,” Steve says. He drums his fingers on the glass bartop. “Think it’s killing him?”

“He looks like he’s having the time of his life,” Natasha says, red lips quirking up at the corners.

“Where’s Clint?” Steve asks.

The bartender comes down the bar toward him and sets his glass of whiskey down on a napkin.

“Bracelet?” she asks.

Steve offers his wrist and she taps her metal wand to it.

“Anything else for now?” she asks and Steve shakes his head.

“Thanks for the alcohol,” he says with a smile.

“Thanks for the money,” she nods at him.

Steve watches her, swallows a slight case of the nerves with a mouthful of whiskey.

“Almost ready,” she says. “Where’s Barnes?”

“Offended he didn’t get a black bracelet,” Steve smiles. He turns this time, side-by-side with Natasha. He looks past the top level to two levels below.

The glass floor is lit a vibrant purple and there’s a significantly fewer number of Louboutins and pure gold cufflinks. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds for Steve to spot the thickly built silhouette, maroon suit, with a loose white scarf around his neck. His hair is pulled back into a loose ponytail, his silver hand gleaming as he taps it against the edge of a roulette table. He’s all cool, languid lines, not that Steve’s watching that closely.

“Pretty useless getaway driver without a car,” Natasha says.

“If anyone could manage, it’s Bucky,” Steve says, mouthing a smile against the rim of his glass.

“Uh huh,” Natasha offers, a little too knowingly.

Steve watches Bucky lean over the roulette table, eyes on the small ball as it rolls around the wheel.

They stand in silence, Steve slightly tense and Natasha knocking back her vodka with ease. No plan is ever without risks, but the margins on this one are particularly thin. One move too late, one security guard too many, and the whole thing gets set askew, like an unstable card at the bottom of the entire house. They throw the dice and hope for snake eyes. It’s the fear that everything might go wrong that has the thrill run through him, his hands slightly shaking, a smile close to his mouth.

He likes the thin line of it all.

Steve finishes his whiskey, tipping back the last mouthfuls and puts the glass back down.

There’s some kind of light commotion coming from the middle of their floor.

“Oh look,” Natasha says, drily. “Did you know someone’s been counting cards?”

Steve watches the flurry of movement—security dresses in black suits, with black earpieces, and poorly-hidden arms moving silently and quickly across the floor, at least four of them, fingers to the commtabs at their ears, converging on a dark man in pink fur who’s having unprecedented luck at his table.

His heart rate ticks up, his hands clammy.

Natasha sets her glass down behind her and bends to hike her dress up. Underneath, Steve sees a flash of silver strapped to a band low on her thigh.

Suddenly there’s excitement down the floor, four security guards, a dealer, a flurry of hands and voices and, cutting through the middle, loud, familiar laughter.

Steve feels his pulse spike against his wrist.

“ _Hey!_ ” a shout goes up and then—all hell breaks loose.  
  
Across four different tables and three different floors, small, pops, like the sound of balloons bursting, and then a spray of cards and coins into the air, whistling and clanging and loud, surprised shouts and frantic scrambling clamoring out across the casino.

“ _Calm down!_ ” one of the guards shouts. “Order! _Order!_ ”

The best way to ensure no order is to ask for it. Casino patrons start shouting and banging into one another and tables as more pops go off and suddenly, the slot machines and kiosks start short-circuiting too—the loud, jarring sounds of the slots spinning and dinging and the music growing louder and louder.

Order is a dream and the chaos hits Steve’s vein like a hit of pure adrenaline.

He wipes the grin off his face and Natasha re-emerges, her heels in her hands.

“Let’s rock and roll,” she says and Steve’s not even surprised to see the knives strapped to the inside of her stilettos.

///

The vaults are three levels below the main casino floor, the code-locked door guarded behind three sets of other guarded doors and a labyrinth of corridors. They have no more than fifteen minutes before the guards return to their elevator posts, which means no more than ten minutes to crack the vault and safe and no more than five minutes to get through and get back out.

Everything turns on a hair-thin razor. It’s exactly what they were brought together to do.

It’s easy to slip through the floor toward the back of the room in the chaos. The two guards stationed by the elevator abandon their posts to sort through what little semblance of order remains. Steve makes sure to bump into one of them as they shuffle past, a harried apology to a man who barely glances his way and notices Steve’s hand slipping into his jacket even less.

The thrill is electric in his spine, the grin spread across his face.

“Show off,” Natasha mutters, but her mouth is curved up too.

They slip into a black elevator, pressing the simtabs nestled under their ears. Tony’s facial recognition scrambler lights a bright yellow, distorting their faces and any identifying features for any security camera tracking them. Steve leans forward and taps the black security card against a reader.

“Clint?” Steve asks as Natasha hits a button that looks like two stars.

A panel along the elevator lights up, asking for a code, and Natasha digs into her cleavage, producing something that looks like a round button and placing it on top. Tony’s de-coder runs some kind of scrambling device, re-coding the system. The panel lights up, running through a thousand set of numbers before settling on four digits. There’s a beeping and the elevator starts to slide down.

“Surprisingly good at setting off explosions _and_ blending in down back corridors,” Natasha says.

“Is it because he’s blond?” Steve wonders, eyeing his reflection in the mirror.

Natasha snorts.

“I think it’s because he’s not built like a tank,” she says and pats Steve’s bicep in what is probably meant to be a comforting manner.

“No one’s had any complaints yet,” Steve mutters.

“I’m sure Barnes will appreciate you bench pressing him,” Natasha replies, with an eye roll she doesn’t quite try to hide.

The elevator door slides open with a low ding before Steve can protest or make a comment otherwise. He does, however, flush up the back of his neck.

Natasha smirks and Steve shakes his head.

A man blatantly checks out their getaway driver a handful of times and suddenly everyone thinks they know he wants to shove him against a wall and attach himself to his neck. Which, to be clear, Steve definitely does.  
  
“This way,” he says, ignoring Natasha and checking the map on his cracked watch. It casts up a small hologram into the space above it and immediately zooms in on where he and Natasha are standing. A moment later it zooms out, showing him the blueprint of a labyrinth of corridors and hallways.

He shifts the gun from under his jacket to his hand, checks down the empty corridor, and moves.

///

Bucky steps back from the roulette table, shouts and dings and clangs growing louder and louder around him until it rattles around uncomfortably in his head. There’s a reason he stays behind the wheel and it’s not because it’s the safest place to be. The vibration of the car engine, the purr he feels even when he can’t hear it, sink through his flesh and metal skins, reverberating around his bones and dragging some calm into him. It’s grounding, even in the danger of the moment, to know he can press down on the accelerator and go.

Not so much in the middle of a casino, with chaos tearing through the air.

He sighs, goes to run a hand through his hair—nervous habit—and finds he’s put it up today. Steve makes one offhand remark about liking to take hair down and he loses his goddamned mind. Pathetic.

Two security guards shove past him toward a slot machine spewing coins and going slightly berserk, and Bucky hisses in irritation.

Two levels above him, he can see Sam in his pink fur, trying to sweet talk his way out of his current situation.

Bucky looks at his watch and feels his own adrenaline spike.

 _ **19:03**_.

Twenty minutes to run the job.

He looks around him, looks back up at Sam, smiles, and winds his way off the floor.

///

“You two took your time,” Clint says with a grin. He’s shrugged out of his jacket and is down to slacks, his purple t-shirt, and a vest over the top. Some of his blond hair flops lazily into his eyes; the rest is styled up high in a mohawk. He has straps down his arms and small, cylindrical devices nestled into them.

“I’m sorry, some of us can’t pass for the caterers,” Natasha grunts. She still has her shoes dangling off of two fingers and in the other, a gun held out. “We’re on the clock, Barton. Don’t you have a job to do?”

“A man can’t get any appreciation for his work,” Clint mumbles, but moves quickly through the empty corridors. The sides are lit with white fluorescent lights and at the turn of every corner, there’s a security camera lodged firmly and conspicuously into the wall.

“Better hope Stark’s scrambler’s still working,” Steve says, puffing a little as they pick up speed.

“Wonder what my face looks like,” Clint muses ahead of them and turns sharply to the right, disappearing around the corner.

“Can’t be dumber than what it looks like already,” Natasha mutters.

“Thank you!” Clint says brightly. He comes to a halt a few feet later, his arms windmilling in the air as though to stop and quiet Natasha and Steve.

Natasha hooks her Louboutins to one of the straps around her thigh and ties the bottom part of her dress high out of the way. When she’s done, she’s checking the weight of her gun against her palm.

Steve’s watch flashes with a message from Tony.

_**45 seconds until the patrol turns the corner** _

“Set her up,” he tells Clint.

“This is my favorite part,” Clint grins.

He turns his hearing aid all the way down and moves quickly toward the dark door cutting the hallway short. The door is at least half a foot thick, made of steel and reinforced iron and stretches from the tiled floor to the flat metal ceiling. The retinal scanner sits almost perfectly eye-level with Clint, the glass panel blinking white and green, a few inches to the right. Clint ignores it entirely, feeling along the door’s edges for the nearly invisible hinges instead.

“No handles,” Steve observes quietly while Clint all but scales the wall, setting square, black devices the size of an eyeball along where the hinges should be.

Natasha has her gun out, trained at the door.

“Think it’ll just swing open?” she mutters.

“We’re going to find out,” Steve says as Clint reemerges, backing just far enough away from the door for Steve to be slightly concerned.

Clint motions frantically for both of them to lean back and Steve’s nerves surge. He grabs Natasha’s shoulder and shuffles them back.

His watch lights up again.

_**turned the corner. now or never, sunshine** _

“Now, Clint,” Steve says tersely.

Clint doesn’t hear him, but the detonation devices start blinking bright red, first slow and then faster and faster.

“I lied!” Clint yelps, gleefully, voice raised, at the same time a loud sound like electrical frying zaps through the air. Steve can see the electrical charge between the bombs, short-circuiting the retinal scanner and blasting the hinges off the door.

The hinges fly back and Steve ducks as one comes hurtling toward him.

“ _That’s_ my favorite part,” Clint says as they all straighten, hearts hammering, and, in fact, his eyes are wide, the blue nearly glowing. It’s way too similar to the slightly crazed look Steve knows he gets when he’s running a job that’s almost gone wrong. Steve’s own chest is beating fast, but he can see the energy vibrate through Clint. Explosions are his own kind of bloodlust, the crazy motherfucker.

“Come off your high later,” Natasha grunts and pushes past him. “We have two more doors and no time.”

The blast forces the door open, so Natasha gets her fingers behind the metal and wrests it back the rest of the way.

“Twenty five seconds,” Steve says urgently and Clint, beaming like a fucking electrical charge himself, runs for the next set of hinges.

///

They have less than thirty seconds for Clint to set up his next bombs and blow the hinges off the door before the security guard comes back. Steve hauls the door behind them closed while Natasha trains her gun around the corner, ready to shoot on sight.

“Back, back!” Clint motions frantically and they duck again as the charge goes out, the hinges bouncing off the wall behind them and going skittering down the hallway.

“Fuck,” Steve curses and sets off after it. “ _Go_.”

He skids down the hallway and scoops up the hinge before it bounces off the corner. He curses as he puts it in his pocket and sprints back up toward the open door. He manages to grab it open and hurl himself through, almost slamming the door shut behind him just as the first guard rounds back the corner again.

“Back, back!” Clint says again and Steve curses again, ducks and they do it again.  
  
  
By the time they get through the third door, Steve’s heart is racing, his head pounding from the electrical shocks rippling through the air, the time ticking down around them almost like a tangible, physical weight. The collar of his shirt sticks to the back of his neck, slick with sweat.

“Jesus Christ,” Clint says out loud, eyes widening.

The vault door stretches a quarter of the length of the hallway, a round, steel-enforced, concrete behemoth encased in gold and silver. Stretching out from the middle of the door are three, ten-feet long poles, crossed in the center like a ship’s wheel. In the center of the wheel is what looks like a raised combination pad with four slots.

They have fifteen minutes left before the codes change and a whole fucking vault to get through. Things are looking slightly more impossible than they had four minutes and three blasted doors ago.

“Natasha,” Steve grunts as Clint, nearly buzzing, pulls the door closed behind them. “Thirty seconds.”

“I’m not a miracle worker, Steve,” Natasha says and while that might be the case, she doesn’t really have a choice right now. “Here, catch.”

Steve grabs the gun she throws out of mid-air.

“Now you’re just a little thing, aren’t you?” Natasha says. She puts her ear up to the cold, metal of the vault, and listens.

///

Natasha is the best vault breaker this side of the Mississippi, but she’s right. She’s no miracle worker.

She has her ear pressed to the metal and she’s sounding out the third digit when Clint grabs Steve’s elbow.

“Incoming, Cap,” he mutters.

There’s no real time to think. The guard comes around the corner just as Natasha scrolls past the third digit. His eyes open wide as he sees them and his hand is already halfway to the alarm when Steve takes the shot.

The charge hits the guard in the chest and he lets out a strangled scream before he falls hard to his knees and onto his face.

“Damn,” Clint blinks.

“Ten minutes,” Steve says. He thumbs it into his watch, the face glowing ominously as the countdown starts. “Before the alarms go up.”

“I won’t need more than seven,” Natasha smirks. She turns the third dial into place.

///

Bucky adjusts his sunglasses, scrolling through his iPod for the song he’s looking for.

There’s a commotion outside of the casino doors, security guards rushing from their posts to whatever’s happening inside.

He pauses at a song he hasn’t listened to in a while. He doesn’t remember the words, but he remembers the upbeat tempo. That’s not bad. He presses play with his thumb.

He tilts his head as the music spills out from the speakers.

His watch lights up.

 **19:15**.

He taps his fingers along the windowsill in time with the beat, bopping his head a little. He even mouths out the words to the chorus, a smile twisting at the corner of his mouth.

Bucky’s phone lights up all of a sudden with an incoming call. He glances over, sees Stark’s irritating face. He hadn’t even put his picture in his phone. The phone had come that way, somehow.

He ignores it.

The song ends and a different one starts.

 **19:18**.

Bucky smiles and turns on the car.

///

The vault door swings open smoothly to reveal the cage doors inside.

Natasha slides a hand down to her thigh again and comes away with what looks like a knife. She thumbs a panel at the base and the blade glows a deep, hot red. She presses the top point to a bar a foot above her head. The metal gives a moment of resistance before it begins melting.

It takes her all of thirty seconds to cut through the cage. The bars warp at the ends, curling in on themselves. What’s left in the middle is a space for her to walk clean through.

“That is not Cap-sized,” Clint says, conversationally. His mouth smacks with something and Steve frowns, his nerves spiking.

“Where did you get gum?” he asks.

“In my pocket,” Clint grins. “Want a piece?”

“No, thanks,” Steve says shortly. Clint’s not entirely wrong about the Natasha-sized cage cutout, but Steve manages to squeeze himself through anyway.

The inside of the vault is spacious, the walls lined with small, gold safe deposit boxes. Against the far wall is a safe three times the size of the rest.

“Natasha,” Steve says, urgently.

“Three minutes,” Natasha says, pulling out device that looks like a stethoscope. How many things does she have strapped to her thighs?

Steve looks at his watch and then back out into the hallway. Clint’s looking down toward the unconscious guard, a surprised expression on his face.

“Cap,” Clint says, a discordant tone in his voice.

“Fuck,” Steve says, realization dawning.

Clint isn’t fast enough to draw his weapon before he’s shot.  
  
  
He _is_ fast enough to spin his entire body to the left, though. The bullet misses his shoulder by inches, ricocheting off the metal wall two feet to the left of the open vault door.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Steve curses. He squeezes his body back through the Natasha-sized cage hole, fancy shoes skidding along the slick, buffed floors.

“Hey!” the shout of a second guard comes, rough and angry, a mere handful of feet from where Steve shoves Clint out of the way.

He raises his gun and shoots.

The guard ducks and Steve curses.

“Cap!” Clint shouts again. He tosses Steve something that looks like a small, lit up square.

“Are you shitting me!” Steve shouts back. The square blinks rapidly.

“I’d throw it sooner rather than later!” Clint runs backwards his arms covering his head.

“ _Motherfucking fuck_ ,” Steve growls. He doesn’t need to be told twice.

The second guard’s hand is an inch away from the panic button hidden behind his simtab when Steve winds his arm back. He hurls the small device through the air and then turns and runs, grabbing Clint along the way.

They both skid on their feet, sliding to their knees at the opposite end of the hall.

The guard shouts when something a little like a contained sonic boom goes off where he is. It’s not as destructive as a normal detonation, but it does emit some kind of an electric radio wave that knocks him clear off his feet. He flies back half a dozen feet and is unconscious before his body hits the ground.

It takes almost thirty seconds for Steve’s ears to stop ringing. He feels like his entire body is covered with crackling, static electricity. When he can open his eyes again, his heart is racing in his eardrums. He’s going to develop a fucking _arrhythmia_ thanks to Clint Barton.

“ _What the fuck_?” Steve says loudly.

Clint blinks, unfazed, pushing a flop of blond hair out of his eyes.

“Hey,” he says and then slowly grins. “Cool.”

“Idiots,” a voice comes, low and unimpressed.

Steve and Clint look up from where they’re on the ground. Natasha is carefully extracting herself from the melted cage. She looks at the destruction, extremely unmoved. The lingering electrical energy makes some of her hair stand up on edge.

“Are you done being dramatic?” Natasha asks. “We have six minutes to get the hell out of dodge.”

“How did she do that?” Clint wonders out loud.

Steve gets to his feet. His hair is messed up, his jacket rumpled. He’s kind of been knocked sideways. He hates demos.

He grasps a small, metal cube from his inner pocket and sets it on top of one of the warped metal bars. He thumbs a button and steps back. Before their eyes, the warped metal unwraps, sliding down and stretching into whole bars again. The cage, reformed, protects the vault room inside, almost as though the entire area remains untouched.

He grasps the edge of the enormous vault door and, with a small grunt, hauls it shut.

There’s a moment of silence between the three of them.

“Stark doesn’t get to know all of his gadgets worked,” Clint says, scratching his nose.

“Yeah,” Steve says, eyes a little wide and crazy. “Not a chance.”

They turn back, out the way they came, the same way they came.

///

Sam is being belligerent.

It’s not so hard with four white guards who are trying to accuse him of counting cards, hands on their weapons, two of them _actually_ trying to touch his fur coat.

“Oh _hell_ no,” he says out loud. “Do you _know_ how much this cost? More’n your paycheck’s worth, bet.”

The guards don’t seem pleased with that.

He supposes it’s not entirely their faults. The cards have stopped spewing everywhere, but the slot machines are still out of control. There’s coins coming out of the bottom, flooding the floor in all of the areas around them. There aren’t enough guards to keep the casino patrons back.

Everyone is shouting, shoving at each other, trying to get their hands on the gold. It’s a borderline fucking riot.

“Don’t you have something better to be doing?” Sam asks. He straightens his body chain. There’s at least one guard who’s been eyeing it and him and it’s to this guard that Sam flashes a hint of a grin, a finger twisting in his chain.

“What’s a little card counting between friends?” he says.

There’s a tense pause.

The guards look at him, gobsmacked.

Out of the corner of his eyes, across the floor, two levels down, he sees a red head with hair standing up at the edges, in a green, slinky dress. She has a phone to her ear. The two men beside her look dumb, but rumpled.

Sam grins.

“Sorry fellas,” he says. “Guess my ride’s here. This has been a pleasure.”

“Stay where you are,” one of the guards shouts over the mayhem of the casino floor. He raises his taser, finally, but Sam’s job here is done.

He grasps the edge of the table, stands up, and flips it.

“Boy, bye,” he says and runs.

///

“Book it,” Steve pants as he slides into the car.

Bucky holds up a single finger.

“Now’s _not the time_ , Barnes!” Natasha shouts from the back seat.

Bucky sighs and adjusts his glasses.

“ _Barnes_!” Natasha snaps again.

Suddenly, a whole commotion at the door. A blur in pink and some gold glittering against dark skin.

Sam opens the door and bodily throws himself in.

“Go, go!” he pants, eyes wide with the crazed thrill of adrenaline.

“No one ever thanks the getaway driver,” Bucky says, and peels out of the neon-colored carport.

In the back seat, Sam tilts his head back and _laughs_.

[ … ]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter almost KILLED me to write, so I hope it was at least fun and exciting to read. Thank you for your comments, it's always a delight to know what parts were fun for YOU!! ♥!!


	4. 004. [ HQ ]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I like it,” Bucky says finally, with a smile that is as soft as it has an edge. “You ever think that? I like being a criminal?”
> 
> Steve tilts his head. 
> 
> “Guess not,” Steve says. "At least not explicitly." 
> 
> “Well I do, Steve,” Bucky says, softly. He’s beautiful like this; dangerous and happy. “I like being a criminal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so happy you guys enjoyed the crazy casino heist!! And now, a fun breather before more criminal activity. :)

**004\. [ east flatbush, brooklyn, new york ]**

Someone pops a bottle of champagne. It’s all a little fuzzy who starts, but the bottle begins in one corner and ends up with Natasha, who has the bottom of her green dress in one hand and the champagne in the other. She tips the mouth back and then smacks her lips in satisfaction.

“Move,” she says and Clint only scoots enough for half a person.

Natasha is about the size of half a person, but she shrugs and tosses herself onto the couch anyway. Her feet end up in Clint’s lap and Clint, for his part, seems perfectly content leaning close to her and whispering things into her ear.

“Shut up,” she commands in a way that’s way more giggle than command. “My feet hurt. Have you ever had to run in Louboutins?”

“What’s a Louboutin?” Clint blinks.

Natasha snorts and Clint ends up rubbing her ankles and perfectly manicured feet.

There are signs of celebration elsewhere too. Tony pours a round of shots for everyone.

“Salud,” Sam grins and Steve gives him a crooked smile back.

“You have pink fur in your hair,” he says, but clinks his glass against Sam’s. “Salud.”

They throw the shots back and Bucky watches Steve’s throat as he swallows. Sam makes him laugh and Bucky watches his Adam’s apple bob up and down as he does so. They get another round of shots. Bucky isn’t opposed.

“Easy day for you,” Bruce says at Bucky’s elbow. Bucky looks at him in mild surprise.

Bruce mostly keeps to himself, unless he’s hacking something or telling Tony something is a bad idea. Tony had tried to get him to take shots with him, while talking rapidly about the science behind the regeneration of metallic ions or something something science, but Bruce, who has apparently never felt the need to walk anyone through his hacking, even though, arguably, it’s as important as Tony’s devices, had shrugged off with a confused expression on his face. Tony had taken the rejection personality for the three seconds before he spotted the tequila bottle. Then, all bygones forgotten, he took the opportunity to steal the entire bottle and sit down on the couch, next to a disgruntled looking Natasha.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. Bruce offers him a glass of something clear.

“I don’t like shots and I hate champagne,” he says, smiling.

“Thanks,” Bucky smiles. “Your...hacking. It was impressive.”

Bruce laughs lightly at that. The two of them lean against a metal table, watching the revelries half in fascination and half in amusement. Bucky brings the glass to his mouth and swallows.

“Rum?” he blinks.

“Yeah, it’s not the best,” Bruce chuckles. “I couldn’t find the vodka.”

“Bet I know where it went,” Bucky’s mouth curves up, eyes flickering to Natasha.

He takes another mouthful anyway. Clint is shouting something at the others now and Sam and Tony are glaring at each other from across the room, shot glass gripped in Sam’s hand and bottle in Tony’s. There’s something strange here, something Bucky can’t quite put his finger on.

It feels...fun. It almost makes him want to smile.

“That wasn’t the worst it could have been,” Bruce observes. “They’re still trying to sort through what happened on the floor, so no one knows the funds are gone yet.”

Bucky looks over at Bruce. The older man has dark curls streaked with grey hair and a demeanor as light and easy to lean into as Tony’s is abrasive and loud.

“When are they going to find out?” Bucky asks.

Bruce smiles over his glass.

“When someone tries to leave the casino.”

That makes Bucky snort. Tony had cut through all of their bracelets using some laser that had burned hot only for a second and then felt light as a breeze against his wrist.

“How much is the payout?” Bucky asks after a minute.

Bruce swallows a mouthful of rum.

“You wanna retire?” he asks.

“Not really,” Bucky says, thinking about it.

“You could,” Bruce says. “That’s definitely a possibility.”

Bucky raises an eyebrow, but Bruce just shakes his head slightly, in amusement. Bucky’s not entirely sure what their cuts are, percentage-wise, and he’s never really bothered to ask. He’s not in this life for the pay, although it doesn’t hurt.

He watches the room quietly from where they stand, slowly sipping on his rum and letting the tension drain from his shoulders. It always catches, somewhere near his neck, and he doesn’t notice until the air around him settles and he feels his body let down with it. The air is loose tonight, after the job that they pulled. It’s not just the alcohol or the laughter, it’s the way the confidence moves through each of them.

Bucky’s seen this happen before. What starts off as strangers becomes acquaintances and what becomes acquaintances eventually solidifies into a crew.

He can already look over at each and every one of them and identify what their tells and weaknesses are. Maybe, more importantly, he can identify their strengths. He would never use the word _friends_ , but it would not be the most inaccurate descriptor.

“Do you?” Bucky asks.

“Hm?” Bruce finishes his glass with a little sigh and puts it down on the table next to them.

“Retire,” Bucky says. “Do you want to?”

Bruce smiles.

“I could,” he says. “I have the money for it.”

Bucky waits.

“But no,” Bruce says. “Not yet. What I do, I do because I want to.”

Bucky feels himself smile at that. He feels loose too. That easy, languid confidence hanging in the air is like an infection to him; he doesn’t ask for it, but he feels it sinking into his bones.

“I like it too,” he says. “I like driving.”

“You’re good at it,” Bruce says in amusement.

Then there’s a flurry of activity, meaning Tony gets up from the couch in some kind of a huff and then he’s tugging on Bruce’s elbow, despite Bruce’s protests otherwise, and there’s some other game that they’re starting, with liquor and teams and no one will let Bruce slink behind his computer bank again because, as Tony keeps insisting, _it’s unsportsmanlike, Doctor Doom and Gloom_.

Bucky turns away.

He finds a place on the newly empty couch.

///

It all gets away from Steve faster than expected. Sam and Tony settle themselves at the table across from one another, two lines of shot glasses filled with tequila mirroring each other. Even Natasha and Clint have wandered up from the couch in curiosity. Steve has already had more champagne than he had intended and a few rounds of shots besides. He shrugs out of his jacket and unbuttons his shirt further, until he can feel air better against his collarbone.

He lets out a relieved breath and ducks Tony’s outstretched arm. By the time he collapses on the couch, his long legs spread out in front of him, Bucky has an eyebrow raised at him.

“Is it hot in here or is it just me?” Steve asks, rucking his shirt out of his pants and scrubbing a hand through his hair.

“How do you want me to answer that?” Bucky asks. He has a glass with him and he takes a small sip, his expression amused.

“You can call me hot,” Steve says. “I don’t mind.”

That makes Bucky snort. After a moment, he offers Steve his glass.

“It’s rum,” he says.

“Great,” Steve says and takes it, gratefully. “I’m sick of tequila.”

He’s not unaware of Bucky watching him as he takes a mouthful of his drink. It feels nice, if he’s of the mind to admit it to himself. His head is only pleasantly swimming from the alcohol he’s had so far, so he allows the warmth to settle into his stomach.

“That wasn’t as smooth as usual,” Bucky remarks, after a minute. It takes Steve a moment to realize he means the job and not Steve’s mediocre attempt at buzzed flirting.

“Sometimes you gotta improvise,” Steve says. He takes a piece of ice between his teeth and crushes it. “Part of the whole thing.”

“People don’t usually like improvising,” Bucky says carefully. “Especially not when the stakes are this high.”

That makes Steve’s mouth quirk up at the corners.

“No?”

“Usually,” Bucky says. “But.”

“But?” Steve turns his head slightly.

“You looked like you were having a good time,” Bucky says. Steve likes it when Bucky’s cool blue eyes are turned on him. He’s never so much looking as he is watching. It makes Steve feel hot all over, every fucking time.

He grins and takes another swallow.

“Did I?” he says. “How curious.”

“You got a death wish, Rogers?” Bucky asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Not really,” Steve says. He inclines his head. “But.”

“But?” Bucky prompts.

“Might be I like having a good time,” Steve says with a wolfish grin.

That makes Bucky roll his eyes, quick and exasperated. It doesn’t make Bucky move away from him. Steve can almost feel the heat rolling off the other man’s body.

“What’s a good time for you?” Bucky asks.

Steve actually stops thinking about his dick for two seconds enough to consider that. It’s an evolving answer, if he’s honest with himself. He’s not the same, skinny, poor kid who got into the game to pay off his mother’s medical bills. He rolls a shoulder and feels the muscles bunch under his shirt. Sometimes, he forgets.

“Anything that makes me feel good,” he says after a moment. He turns his head to Bucky, who’s watching him with a half discerning and half amused look.

“And what makes you feel good, Steve Rogers?” Bucky asks, tilting his head. When he looks at Steve like this, hair falling out of his bun, blue eyes clear and bright, Steve feels sparks lick down his spine.

“I like it when my blood gets going,” Steve says, tilting closer.

A hand crawling onto Bucky’s thigh, his shoulder pressed to Bucky’s flesh shoulder. Bucky doesn’t move, although his eyes flicker down and then back up.

“Like when a job’s about to go belly up and you swing out at the last second?” Bucky asks.

“There’s a period,” Steve says. If there are other people in the room, he forgets. This close to Bucky, eyes caught, he’s unable to look away. “That last five minutes of a job that you’re cutting close. The adrenaline turned up to 11, your heart ticking faster and faster. Your hands grow sweaty. Sometimes, you stop thinking. The beats between the moments grow slower, even though time is draining.”

Bucky swallows and Steve watches that movement.

“Your hands start to shake. It’s now or never, do or die,” Steve says. He feels it in his gut, the gathering heat, the spark of excitement as his breathing quickens. “Will you make it out the way you want? Will you get caught?”

Bucky licks his lips and Steve watches that too.

“Will you?” he asks, lowly.

Steve smiles, squeezing Bucky’s thigh gently.

“Sometimes,” Steve says and he feels almost drunk now. “And if you don’t, then what? How will you get out of a web of your own making?”

“I usually just drive away,” Bucky says. He hasn’t looked away from Steve in minutes. His own pupils are dilated, a reflection of Steve’s own.

God, Steve wants to kiss him then. He could just cup his face and lean forward—just press their mouths together, lick into the heat of Bucky’s mouth. Is it a bad idea to want someone on your crew? Steve can’t bring himself to care.

Still, he refrains. He laughs instead, although this, too, is low.

“It’s the thrill of impossibility,” he answers. “That’s what gets my blood going. Not the danger of almost getting caught, but the impossibility of keeping yourself from it. Does that make sense?”

“Not really,” Bucky gives him a half smile. “You’re kinda crazy, you know that, Rogers?”

“I’ve been told,” Steve grins, slowly. “Once or twice before.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything for a minute and then, slowly, reaches forward to pluck the glass of rum from Steve’s hand. He drinks it, not breaking eye contact the entire time.

Steve is distracted by Bucky’s mouth on the rim, but not distracted enough to not forget his question.

“Why do you do this?” Steve asks. “Why are you here, Bucky Barnes?”

That doesn’t startle Bucky. It doesn’t make much of an impression at all. He simply keeps his mouth on the glass, then tilts it back to drain it. Steve can feel the hunger lick up through his stomach, nearly hot to touch. He watches Bucky’s throat bob, hears the crunch of ice as he crushes them between his teeth.

When he finishes, Bucky gives the glass back to Steve and Steve takes it.

“I like it,” Bucky says finally, with a smile that is as soft as it has an edge. “You ever think that? I like being a criminal?”

Steve tilts his head.

“Guess not,” Steve says. "At least not explicitly."

“Well I do, Steve,” Bucky says, softly. He’s beautiful like this; dangerous and happy. “I like being a criminal.”

///

Bucky walks into the warehouse with an extra large cup of coffee. It’s been a series of early mornings for him, for no discernible reason. The casino heist had gone off so well that he’d barely been able to look at the deposit into his bank account without going a little cross-eyed. He doesn’t touch those funds, but he does treat himself to a few extra large mochas and caramel macchiatos and a variety of other drinks that make him curl into himself from the sugar and caffeine content.

He’s buzzing on sugar, his sunglasses pulled over his eyes, a different bomber jacket on this time. This one has some kind of rainbow ombre down the side. It’s his favorite. He’s decided to wear his hair down today, the curls that always spiral at the ends brushing the top of his shoulders. He looked in the mirror one time this morning and felt pleased with his decisions. That had contributed to the extra large coffee.

Across the headquarters, the crew is spread out in a manner of lethargic poses. Sam and Clint are playing cards at the table and Bruce and Tony are hunched over one of Bruce’s screens, at least one or both of them emitting noises that can only be described as giggles. Bucky raises an eyebrow and scans the floor until he finds Steve and Natasha on the couch, Natasha slotting into his side in a manner that’s so easy and casual that Bucky definitely does not feel a distinct stab of jealousy.

Any time in between jobs is theirs to play with, but the problem with a seasoned group of criminals is that they don’t know what to do with downtime. Bucky thinks this is what’s been waking him up early in the morning—not anticipation for the next job, but the inability to keep still until it. He checks his watches three times a day and he knows everyone else does too.

He settles into a chair in front of a screen that Tony’s set up to work like a television.

“Stark,” he tilts his head back. “Turn it on.”

“Never a please or a thank you,” Tony mutters as he pops his head up from next to Bruce’s shoulder. He jabs something into his watchcaster and the screen flickers to life in front of Bucky. It’s some channel playing the news, which is fine with him. Tony raises his voice. “You’re _welcome_.”

Bucky raises a select finger behind him and a smattering of snickers echoes across the cavern of a room. He hears some indignant muttering, but Bruce must pull Tony back to their activity, because he doesn’t hear that grating voice again.

This suits Bucky just fine, who hooks an ankle around another chair and drags it over so he can prop his feet up on top. He sips at his coffee and half watches the screen and half listens to a playlist he can’t remember making, but evidently did in the middle of a bout of frenzied insomnia.

He’s aware of movement next to him and looks up to see Natasha ease herself onto the chair that his feet are currently occupying.

“Hey,” Bucky protests, half-heartedly and gets a smirk back for his efforts.

“Shush,” she says. “I’m trying to watch the news.”

Bucky glares at her with as much ire as he can muster, which admittedly isn’t as much as he’d like, as wired on sugar as he is. He moves his feet down and Natasha reaches forward and pats his thigh for the effort.

The camera fixes on an older man in an expensive grey suit. He has silver hair, combed over, and just enough loose skin too look dignified, but not so much that he looks actively old. He has an easy smile and a slow, reassuring voice. He’s everywhere these days—Alexander Pierce.

When he talks, Bucky tends to check out, but there’s no escaping his idealistic, utopian vision for Society. He’s a political dream—a politician with strong convictions who spends most of his time doing philanthropic works and trying to make the city a safer place. He comes down hard on almost everything people like to hear—corporations, criminals, con artists. The three big Cs.

“The real criminals are the rich,” Steve mutters, crossing his arms at his chest.

Pierce starts talking about some specific anti-crime legislation that makes Bucky consider tilting back in his chair and napping. Luckily, he must run out of things to say, because the news switches over to different coverage before Bucky can work up a snore.

“They’ve been running _this_ for the past week, tch,” Natasha says, unimpressed.

Something something Stark Industries and something something parcels of land and corporate neighborhoods.

“We already know we’re bought by billionaires, don’t see why we have to keep hearing about it,” Bucky mumbles over the mouth of his coffee.

“How fatalist of you,” Natasha observes, her eyes flickering from the screen to Bucky.

“I’m a realist,” Bucky proclaims. He’s neither. He’s anything he wants to be and, usually, that’s someone who doesn’t really care. The mechanisms of greater Society are all beyond him.

“That’s boring,” Natasha says and nudges his shin with her foot.

“Hey,” Bucky frowns.

Stark must turn the volume up from where he is near Bruce, because suddenly Bucky can hear the newscaster clearly. Natasha’s not wrong. Any time he’s walked by a television, there’s been a cycle of the same coverage—billionaires this, billionaires that, neighborhoods ground to dust under the corporate thumb of capitalism, or something. What does Bucky care about any of that? He just wants to drive.

“Hey Stark,” Natasha calls out, tilting her head behind her.

There’s no response for a moment and then a yelp as someone—undoubtedly Bruce—jabs Tony’s side.

“What?” Tony says, blinking. And then, louder, “ _What_?”

“Did you hear what dear old dad is up to now?” Natasha grins.

Bucky raises an eyebrow between the two of them and turns his attention back to the screen. A woman in a distractingly shiny silver suit is talking rapidly.

“What?” Steve mutters and slides into a chair that had not been there a second before, next to Bucky.

“Stark Industries has bought the East Village,” Bucky says, taking a loud slurp of his coffee. “Now they have a matching set.”

The dividing and conquering of Manhattan by corporate entities has been a brutal, hostile takeover spanning the last few decades. If the island had once been bustling with people free to use any part of it they could reach by the subway or foot, well it had long stopped being that. Every neighborhood charged a fee for entrance. They were all just shills for a multibillion dollar corporation now; a breeding ground for capital greed, not that anyone living across any of the bridges would ever benefit from it. At least not until the corporations came for the outer boroughs. Parts of Brooklyn were already under siege. The last time he had tried to pick up a car from Brooklyn Heights, he found the entire area barred by electric red barricades and an entrance fee he definitely couldn’t afford.

Anyway, it barely registers on Bucky’s radar anymore. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer; isn’t that how it’s always been? Better to watch Society eat itself and steal what he can for himself.

“Wait,” Steve says. “Is that—”

Bucky raises an eyebrow and leans forward, grinning.

There’s a close up of Empire City Casino, the billionaire owner’s face nearly purple with anger.

“Good for us,” Natasha says, with a smile.

The newscaster goes on for some minutes talking about rising crime in Society—the casino was only one of multiple hits recently. Millionaires and billionaires have fallen victim to burglaries, to funds being depleted from their privately kept stores. Not one story or two, but five, six, maybe more.

“I’m starting to think we’re not the only crew in the game,” Steve says mildly and Bucky grins wider. He has the sudden urge to turn his face and bury it into Steve’s obscenely large bicep, but he stops himself from doing that because he’s not a crazy person, he’s definitely cool and subtle about all of the ways he’s laid awake at night, thinking about Steve and his mouth and that night he had been drunk enough to lean into Bucky.

“You think they’re all run by them?” Natasha says, gesturing at the screen. She has one leg folded under her, turned sideways on her chair, her arm along the back.

“Who?” Steve is the one to ask.

“LEVIATHAN,” she says, after a moment.

Bucky doesn’t love hearing its name said out loud. All of this time—all of these months, and they’ve managed to avoid this subject, mostly. He shifts in his seat, feeling uncomfortable.

“Can’t be,” Steve says, with a frown. “We know some of the other crews—the COMMANDOS, the Asgardians. Wouldn’t be caught dead being run by someone outside.”

“Maybe LEVIATHAN isn’t outside, for them,” Natasha says with a shrug.

 “I don’t know,” Steve says, with a frown. “Guess we don’t know much about them.”

“Correction,” Sam says, scraping up another chair and positioning himself behind Bucky. Bucky tilts his head back to look at him and Sam gives him a small head nod. “We don’t know _anything_ about them.”

Bucky gestures at Sam’s face.

“Had to take them out,” Sam says, scratching his nose. “Kept getting caught while I slept.”

“Why would you keep chains on while you sleep?” Bucky mutters to himself, but his voice is drowned out by Tony, unsurprisingly.

“Does it matter?” Tony asks. He helps himself up onto the end of the table, close enough to Natasha that he’s physically eased himself into a conversation no one invited him too. “No, I’m serious. We don’t know who’s behind all of this, but do any of us really care?”

“What, is it a crime to care?” Steve asks, clearly annoyed.

“Did I say it was a crime to care?” Tony shoots back. “Why do you always put words in my mouth? I thought we understood each other.”

“They do not understand each other,” Sam says behind Bucky and Bucky smothers a laugh in his quickly cooling coffee cup.

“We have someone—some entity texting us,” Steve says, straightening. “We don’t know what they look like, we don’t know what they want—”

“We know—” Tony starts and Steve cuts him off.

“Other than the money. They give us jobs and we go and do them. They could be anyone, do anything. So we do the job, we make the money, we transfer it to them, but what if—” Steve says and Tony cuts _him_ off. Honestly, watching the two of them go at it is like the world’s most annoyingly aggressive ping pong match.

“—what if they’re a corporate entity, what if we’re becoming capitalist pigs ourselves, what if it’s all one big giant fuck you to like, Robin Hood, or whatever we consider ourselves blah blah,” Tony says impatiently. He waves his hand dismissively and Bucky can _feel_ Steve rankle at that. “Who cares? We’re still doing what we’d be doing with anyone else. I mean come on, you _come_ from the COMMANDOS. Did you think we didn’t know?”

“I didn’t say that,” Steve says, annoyed. “But we were our own team, Tony. We knew who we were working for and why.”

“You were still running the same scams and heists we’re running here, except this time the pay day is bigger. Same thing different group,” Tony says, leaning forward. “So I’m asking again. Why are you in this, Cap? Are you here because of your ethics, or are you here to get paid?”

“Who said anything about ethics?” Clint joins the group now, fiddling with his hearing aid. He drops onto the ground by Natasha’s feet. She gives him a half smile and nudges his shoulder with her foot.

“I like what we do,” Steve says, almost heated. “I like doing it. That doesn’t mean we have to be stupid about it, Tony. What happens if the next time we’re on a job, the order comes through to take out the person instead of just rob them? We get there, guns loaded, and it’s not a shot to the side, it’s straight through the heart.”

“We’re _criminals_ ,” Tony says. “Did you forget that?”

Tony looks around the group of them.

“Am I insane? We are all in a criminal enterprise, right?” Tony says, blinking.

“We’re criminals,” Clint says, nodding in agreement.

“Listen,” Sam—the voice of reason, always, interjects. “I get where you’re both going with this, but both can be true, okay? You can care about the greater—motivations behind all of this and still want to do it anyway. I was with the Eagles, right? I was legit. Air Force, fly for your country, all that. I lose my guy and you know what the Society tells me? We weren’t following orders. Like fuck we weren’t following orders, they just wanted a bad guy and we were them.”

“You got a point to this story, Big Bird?” Tony raises an eyebrow.

Bucky sighs and puts his empty coffee cup on the floor.

“The _point_ is we’re the bad guys no matter what,” Sam says. “But they can make us the bad guys or we can choose to be the bad guys. It doesn’t really matter how you get there, _but_ the thing is, you don’t have to be the bad guy they make you out to be. You can be bad and your actions still matter. It’s different, making your own calls, and listening blindly to someone else’s calls. That’s what Steve’s trying to say.”

Steve actually looks like he’s going to lose his goddamn mind, but that’s beside the point. Bucky manages to sneak his hand onto Steve’s bicep and squeeze it lightly. At least a little of the redness leaves his delicately fair face.

“Yeah,” Steve breathes out. “We can get paid, but we can’t go into this blind, Tony. I’m willing to break laws I think are bullshit, but I’m not working for corporate shills like—”

“Like what?” Tony sneers. “Like Stark Industries? You can say it.”

“If the billion dollar glove fits,” Steve says and Tony opens his mouth to say something, but Natasha sighs.

“Are you having second thoughts, Steve?” she asks. Natasha doesn’t insert herself into Steve and Tony’s arguments too often, but when she does, she turns her hawk gaze on both and Bucky watches the two men waver with some amount of enthusiasm.

Steve glares at her and glares at Tony. Then, after a moment, he lets out a breath.

“No,” he says. “I don’t mind some mystery, hell there’s something fun about that, I know. But we’re three jobs in and we still don’t know who we’re working for. That doesn’t sit right with me.”

He shifts because everyone’s looking at him now.

“I don’t like going in dark. I like knowing my crew and I like knowing where I’m getting orders from.”

“That’s the risk here,” Natasha says. She moves and the bangles along her wrist jangle. “I’m not disagreeing with you, Steve. I hate it too. But we know what we signed up for.”

“We’re here to steal, not to hurt,” Steve says. He lifts a hand to the back of his neck. “We take from billionaires, corporations, banks? Fine. Fuck them. But things matter. Our actions still _matter_.”

“We’re criminals, babe,” Tony says and slides off the table. “Don’t let your morals get in the way of a good job.”

Bucky can almost _hear_ the sigh rattle through the room.

“You know what, Stark?” Steve says and his tenor changes in a way that drops something hot into Bucky’s gut. It’s low, almost a growl. Steve is always a slow simmering pot of barely repressed rage and sometimes, he simmers over. He stands up this time, towering so far above Bucky he has to crane his neck. “Fuck you.”

Steve turns on his heel and strides all the way across the warehouse, and out the door, slamming it behind him.

Bucky watches him go, then leans down to scoop up his cup before standing.

“What?” Tony says. “You don’t agree with him, do you?”

“You’re both idiots,” Bucky says, with a shrug.

Then he turns on his heels and follows Steve out.  
  
  
“Steve,” Bucky grinds out, a few feet out from the warehouse. He reaches forward, grasps his wrist. Steve slows and Bucky himself is surprised by the gesture.

“Am I wrong?” Steve asks, through clearly gritted teeth. He sounds strangely exhausted, his shoulders up higher than Bucky though they could go. “I love what we do, but there’s a—cost. Doesn’t it bother you?”

Bucky grins grimly at that, although Steve doesn’t see. Then he sighs and turns Steve so the tall blond is facing him.

“Tell me what’s bugging you,” Bucky says, quietly. “I thought you were okay with this.”

Steve sucks in his breath through his teeth and his shoulders hunch further up. Then, through a rushed exhalation, they come back down.

“There was a second, during the job,” he says. “When I thought it was going to go belly up. I saw Clint get shot—or almost shot. I had to shoot someone in return.”

“You’ve never lost a man?” Bucky asks sharply.

Steve runs a hand through his blond hair. It seems lighter in the warm, morning sun.

“I have,” he says reluctantly, as though there’s gravel in his mouth. “That’s why I don’t want—”

Bucky understands, all of a sudden, like a cold glass of water on a hot summer’s day. There’s a moment, when it shifts from acquaintances with names to people with stories; people you know; people you care about. Sometimes that moment happens between gunshots and surviving.

“We’ll be careful,” he says, softly. “They—LEVIATHAN—whatever. They don’t care, but we do. That’s gotta matter for something, right?”

Steve looks dubious.

“I thought you hated Stark,” Bucky tries, with half a smile.

Steve groans at that, covers his face.

“I do,” he says. “That’s the worst part.”

Bucky can’t help but grin at that. He feels lighter than he did an hour before. It means something to him, that someone like Steve would feel this way. That he would look at this group of idiot misfits and think they _matter_.

“We’ll be careful, Steve,” Bucky says. “We’ll take of each other.”

Steve snorts and looks away. Standing here, under the bright sun, his blue shirt clinging to every inch of his torso and leaving nothing to the imagination, the breeze in his hair, the tension in his shoulders—well, he looks like something out of Bucky’s wildest dreams. Some kind of stubborn, gold-hearted, unlawful Greek god with eyelashes so long they reach the top of his absurdly sculpted cheekbones. Bucky’s careful not to sway, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling like he’s levitating.

“No innocents,” Steve says, voice hard. “We take from the rich and give to ourselves. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Bucky laughs at that, just throw his head back and laughs. Steve watches him, somewhat bemused.

“That’s some kinda fucked up Robin Hood,” Bucky says. “Take a childhood story and turn it sideways.”

Steve scratches his nose and looks at Bucky then, maybe a little goofily.

“You grow up, Barnes,” he says, “and everything kinda goes sideways.”

Steve’s not wrong. Bucky continues smiling anyway.

After a minute, Steve lets out a breath and joins him. 

[ … ]


	5. 005. [ heist 3 ]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Just in and out, Cap,” Bucky says, almost quietly. “Just like any other job.” 
> 
> Steve swallows and shifts his weight from one leg to the other again.
> 
> “Yeah,” he says. “Just like any other job.” 
> 
> But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Steve’s not new to this. And he knows when jobs feel good and when they don’t. 
> 
> There’s a feeling crawling up and down the back of his neck and it? Doesn’t feel good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot can happen during a short heist.

 

> | [08:31] **FROM: _LEVIATHAN_**  
>  |  
>  | society international bank  
>  | hunters point, queens  
>  | sunday, july 10
> 
> | [08:32] **FROM: _LEVIATHAN_**  
>  |  
>  | mcclaren gx  
>  | silver  
>  | brooklyn steel, midnight pick up

[ … ]

**005\. [ society international bank, hunters point, queens, ny ]**

Steve’s not new to this. He’s run hundreds of jobs in his criminal career and most, if not all of them, have started off with something similar—the plan running through his head, like a drone buzzing at the back of his skull; the nervous anticipation of what could go wrong and what _will_ go wrong; the thrill of the heist; the charge of adrenaline at the back of his neck.

It’s no different this time—his heart rate is elevated, his hands slightly sweaty.

“That what you’re wearing?” Sam asks, with a crooked smile.

Steve looks down at his clothes. The point is to get in, flirt a little, make Sam fake jealous, create a scene, use that distraction to steal the code to the vaults, slip that code to Natasha, and wait for her to unlock the back door, where Clint and Tony will be waiting to help unload a vault of gold bars into the fake armored vehicle driven by Bruce. He thought black pants with a red and black flannel top seemed practical.

“I like this shirt,” he says with a frown. “I got it on sale at Target.”

“Yeah, like I’m married to a man who shops at Target,” Sam says.

“Did you just have that in your closet?” Steve squints.

Sam looks down at his salmon-colored blazer. Under it, he’s wearing some loose white t-shirt that’s positively glittering with a series of rainbow sequins spelling out something in script that Steve can’t read.

“Unlike you, I got a sense of fashion,” Sam says, turning and giving Steve a demonstration.

Steve, admittedly, doesn’t have much of a fashion sense that isn’t leather, but he does like his flannel.

“You look like you got out of the club, Wilson,” Bucky says. He’s standing against a bright silver car, arms crossed, his usual sunglasses on.

“And Steve looks like he got out of lumberjack school,” Sam says, with a slight air of nausea.

Steve shifts from one leg to another and now he crosses his arms across his chest, chin jutting out defiantly.

“Hot,” Bucky grins and pops a very large and pink bubblegum.

“C’mere, honey,” Sam says and Steve, rolling his eyes, uncrosses his arms and shuffles over to him. “Till pay day do we part.”

Steve offers up a hand and Sam tilts a gold ring into his palm.

“Saddest wedding ceremony I’ve ever seen,” Bucky remarks.

“It’s a short-lived marriage,” Steve says. He slides the gold ring on his ring finger. It catches the low afternoon sunlight and Steve watches it for a moment, his stomach twisting with unease.

There’s something in the air, maybe, but he just can’t settle his nerves.

“Well you don’t gotta look so put out about it,” Sam says, putting his ring on his finger as well. “Just break me into a bank and you don’t even have to consummate the marriage.”

“I hate that word,” Bucky adds, abruptly. “Consummate.”

“Really?” Sam looks at him.

Steve looks at both of them, a frown tugging at his mouth. He bounces up on the balls of his feet and lets himself back down. The hairs at the back of his neck pick up. There’s something in the air, maybe.

Wait, he’s already thought that, Jesus fuck.

“Yeah,” Bucky says and pops another bubble. “It’s all—weird. Clinical. Just say fucked, it’s not that hard.”

“You want me to tell Steve to fuck me?” Sam grins.

Bucky looks at him and then, with a cheerful tilt of his head, flips Sam off.

“Where are the others?” Steve says, and this time he can’t quite keep the nerves out of his voice.

“They’re getting ready,” Sam says and turns back to Steve. “Hey, man, you okay? You look a little green.”

Steve nods, then shakes his head. He crosses his arms again and then looks out across the empty Brooklyn streets.

“Just in and out, Cap,” Bucky says, almost quietly. “Just like any other job.”

Steve swallows and shifts his weight from one leg to the other again.

“Yeah,” he says. “Just like any other job.”

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Steve’s not new to this. And he knows when jobs feel good and when they don’t.

There’s a feeling crawling up and down the back of his neck and it? Doesn’t feel good.

///

It goes like this.  
  


**_1._ **

“You can queue in the third line in a minute,” the woman says. She has dark curls she pins back to the side of her head. She has her Starkpad in front of her, checking the queues and order of the tellers, according to the complexity of the request and, presumably, the amount in the account.

Ahead, the customers walk into curved glass sections, each line lit up in a different, bright color. At the end of the rows, the tellers sit behind thick plexiglass, some physically, some holographically. Then there’s the teller at the end, with the bright purple eyes and a silver sheen to their skin. Androids need a paycheck too.

“Hey, you go to NYU?” Steve says, leaning against the counter, with a smile. “That’s my alma mater.”

The woman looks up from her Starkpad then.

“Really?” she smiles. “What year?”

“What year did you go?” Steve asks.

“Graduated about five years ago,” she says.

“Hey,” Steve says, smoothing his features into pleasant surprise. “So did I.”

“Yeah?” she says and eyes him with interest. “What did you study?”

“Economic redistribution,” Steve grins.

“Sounds fun,” the woman says, a corner of her mouth curving up.

“I’m a fun kinda guy,” Steve says.

The woman eyes him and Steve offers up that smile he knows works like a charm, a smirk at the corners, a glint in his eyes. He runs a hand through his hair a few strands of blond fall into his face.

“How much fun?” the woman asks, carefully.

Hook, line, and sinker.

“Depends on the day,” Steve says, his smirk widening.

“And what about today?” the woman’s eyes haven’t left Steve’s in a moment.

Steve grins.

“Oh tons of fun today,” he says. He offers her a hand. “Grant.”

The woman takes it. Steve lets his hand linger.  
  


**_2._ **

“You gotta be _shitting_ me,” a loud voice says sharply, behind him.

Steve, as though startled, wheels around. The woman he had been talking to freezes, her hand outstretched, a number inked onto her palm.

“Hey, baby,” Steve offers weakly and Sam puffs himself up, salmon jacket and all, severe eyebrows inching higher up into his forehead.

He takes a step forward and Steve takes a step backward.

“Funny,” Sam says loudly, sounding livid. “Didn’t know _Tucson_ was actually somewhere in Queens now.”

“Did I say Tucson?” Steve blanches. “I meant...Forest Hills.”

“Are you _shitting me_?” Sam nearly shouts.

“Riley, I can explain—” Steve says, fumbling for words and Sam slams his hand down on the woman’s counter.

“You explain to _her_?” Sam seethes, voice high, drawing the attention of everyone in the bank now. The air around them goes tight, all eyes riveted to the quickly escalating scenario.

“Explain what?” the woman squeaks.

“ _Why he’s got a wedding band on his goddamned finger_ ,” Sam growls. “But here he is in broad daylight making moves on anything with a fucking _pulse_.”

“Babe,” Steve says urgently. “Don’t make a scene.”

It’s the wrong thing to say and everyone listening knows it. Everyone inhales, sharply, at the same time.

That does it.

Sam makes a _fucking scene_.  
  


**_3._ **

Security guards rush in from the corners of the room, bank tellers half-paying attention to their customers and half-watching this incredibly embarrassing domestic drama play out real-time. Sam lets out a strangled scream. He takes a cup of pens and tries to throw it at Steve.

Steve stumbles backwards, ducking, bumping into a security officer as he tries to help contain the situation.

“Sir,” the officer says to Sam. “Sir, _please_ , we need you both to take this outside.”

“Hey,” a small woman with a straight blonde cut and bright green eyes says at Steve’s elbow. “Can you take your domestic drama somewhere else? Some of us are just trying to deposit some checks.”

There’s a low blinking device nestled under her ear.

Steve slips her the security officer’s key card and Natasha slips through the commotion toward the side door leading to the area behind the plexiglass.

“Never get married,” Steve says, grimly, loudly. “Love’s a fucking myth and the institution of marriage a criminal enterprise.”

Sam lunges at him and when Steve gets knocked back to the ground, everyone around them starts shouting.  
  


**_4._ **

“Hello, boys,” Natasha says, grinning, opening the back gate.

“Love what you’ve done with the hair,” Tony says, gesturing at the blonde. “You gonna keep that?”

“I was thinking about it,” Natasha smirks.

Tony and Clint roll in what look like reinforced steel suitcases.

“That’s all?” Natasha asks and takes the one Clint hands to her.

“They’re bigger than they look,” Clint grins.

The vault is open, row upon row of gold bars glinting at them, theirs for the taking.

“Load her up,” Tony says cheerfully.

Natasha reaches forward for a bar, cool and slick to the touch. They’re marked with some flower on top, although it’s nothing unworkable. The heft of the gold feels heavy in her hands, the weight enough to make her arms strain. It’s a beautiful thing.

The three of the start loading the bars into the suitcases.

“Are these expanding to fit the bars?” Natasha asks, with a little wonder.

“Thank you for noticing,” Tony grins. “Now the physics behind them are complicated, what happens is the nanoparticles—”

“I don’t care,” Natasha says and starts shoving bars into the suitcase faster.

  
She reaches for the last bar of gold when she feels something cold pressed to the back of her head.   
  


**_5._ **

Steve gets dragged up by one security guard, his lip busted and bleeding. Sam gets pulled up by another, his blazer torn, sequins scattered across the ground.

“ _I want a divorce_ ,” Sam shouts, still clawing through the security guards to get to Steve.

“Sorry about this,” Steve says to the woman, who’s backed up with her StarkPad, behind a security guard. “Raincheck on that date?”

Sam lets out a high-pitched shriek and the two of them get dragged out by security, struggling to swipe at each other.

“ _Out_!” the guard attached to Steve roars.

“You got sixty seconds before we call the police,” the one manhandling Sam says.

Both of them get shoved forcibly away from the bank building, stumbling on their feet, Steve holding onto Sam’s arm before he goes careening into oncoming traffic.

“Whoops,” he says.

“Don’t care where you go, but it can’t be _here_ ,” the first guard says and glares at them both before shutting the bank doors in their faces.

Steve, adrenaline practically coursing through him, wipes his hand across his slightly bloodied mouth.

“You got sixty seconds, Widow,” he says, hand to his commtab.

He waits ten seconds for her reply, but nothing comes through the line.

“Widow,” Steve says again. “Natasha.”

“Steve,” Sam says, straightening himself, feet away. “Something’s not right.”

There’s that feeling again—like he’s missed a step that should have been there. His stomach lurches with nausea.

“Fuck,” he says, filling with dread. He takes out his gun.  
  


**_6._ **

Bucky hears the gunshots over his music.

He frowns and, heart thudding faster than he’d like, he lifts his watch up.

“Falcon,” he says. He waits a moment and then, “Cap. Everything okay?”

He wait a few beats, but there’s nothing return to him over the line.

In the distance, more gunshots—unmistakeable this time.

“Widow,” Bucky barks. “ _Stark_.”

Then, after a crackle—

“Barnes,” Bruce’s panicked voice comes over through his speakers. “Barnes, we need you _now_.”

The bank sirens go off ten seconds later, loud and blaring, the door opening and people screaming as they rush out.  
  
  
“Fuck,” Bucky curses from halfway down the street. “ _Fuck._ ”

He shifts the car into gear and guns it.

[ . . . ]


	6. 006. [ recovery ]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re shot,” Bucky takes Steve’s face in his hand, fingers digging hard into his jaw. “Just try and get up again, I fucking dare you.”
> 
> Steve glares up at him, ready for the struggle, but Bucky presses against Steve’s side with a hand and Steve’s body goes kind of slack, his face draining of what little color remains.
> 
> “Natalya,” Bucky rasps out. “Get me a plier and some gauze.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really made you guys suffer last chapter and for that....no apologies. But in return, have my personal _favorite_ chapter. You'll see why. :) ♥

**006\. [ east flatbush, brooklyn, new york ]**

“Another guard,” Natasha says hoarsely. Her hair is loose, there are scrapes across her face, a large gash across her upper arm. Her masking device is dead, half hanging off behind her ear.

“Stretch him out,” Steve says urgently, clutching his side.

“You’re bleeding,” Bucky says, suddenly. He moves forward and Steve shakes his head, shrugs him off. Bruce carries Sam in, his quiet, immense strength a surprise to them all.

“He got the brunt of it,” Steve says. “Knocked out, shot through the stomach, and—”

“ _Steve you’re bleeding_ ,” Bucky growls and grabs Steve by the shirt and shoves him back onto the couch.

“Stop,” Steve says, voice raised. “Sam—”  
  
“We’ve got him,” Natasha says. “Bruce and Tony—”

“ _Tony’s not a doctor_!” Steve shouts and tries to get up, but Bucky shoves him back down again.

“You’re shot,” Bucky takes Steve’s face in his hand, fingers digging hard into his jaw. “Just try and get up again, I fucking dare you.”

Steve glares up at him, ready for the struggle, but Bucky presses against Steve’s side with a hand and Steve’s body goes kind of slack, his face draining of what little color remains.

“Natalya,” Bucky rasps out. “Get me a plier and some gauze.”

“Bucky,” Steve says urgently. “Please. Sam—”

“He got blasted by a laser,” Bucky says grimly.

“ _In the stomach_ ,” Steve says, trying to buck up against Bucky’s grip.

“Stark and Banner can handle that,” Bucky says. “Let me get the bullet out of your side.”

“I don’t have—” Steve says and then he gasps in pain as Bucky presses into his side again.

“You have a fucking bullet in your side, Rogers,” Bucky says through gritted teeth. “Don’t be a self sacrificial fucking moron and _let me take it out_.”

“Here,” Natasha appears at his side, with pliers, gauze, a wet cloth, and a bottle of leftover alcohol.

In the distance, Bucky can hear Tony and Bruce urgently talking, their voices intermingling as they try to take care of Sam.

“Clint?” Bucky asks, taking the supplies with a grimace.

“Knocked around a bit,” Natasha says. “Nothing he won’t live through. Kept asking for his demos.”

“If he can still talk explosives, there’s nothing wrong with him,” Bucky says. He drags over a stool and sits across from Steve.

Steve looks at him angrily, teeth gritted.

“Are you going to let me do my job?” Bucky asks.

Steve seems to growl against it, but then his head slumps back, pain rippling across his features.

“Hey,” Bucky says, his voice growing softer. He leans forward and brushes away sweaty strands across Steve’s forehead. The pliers and alcohol are balanced on the couch arm next to them, the damp cloth across Bucky’s thigh. His stomach twists as he reaches forward to touch Steve’s cheek.

Worry, he thinks. This is what worry feels like.

“Just—rip it out,” Steve says, breathing shallowly.

“Okay,” Bucky says. He thinks for a moment and then moves back. “Forgive me for this.

He grasps the bottom of Steve’s flannel shirt and wrests it from the bullet hole down, ripping a wide swath of cloth. He tears off the bloodied portion and twists the rest.

“Bite down into this,” he says, and helps stuff the piece of shirt into Steve’s mouth.

Then, he leans forward again and starts unbuttoning Steve’s shirt.

He doesn’t even get to admire the broad span of chest hair and muscle. There’s blood covering Steve’s ink, red smeared on top of black shapes and lines.

“Better lay down,” he says and he helps Steve sprawl across the couch.

Steve turns his head toward Bucky and Bucky can see the perspiration beading up at his forehead, his hair a sweaty, damp mess, eyes glassy, blood streaking down his side where the bullet’s lodged in. His breathing is shallower than it was, a quick breath in and a pained breath out. Steve reaches for Bucky, grasping at his shoulder, fingers curling around his bicep instead.

“Okay,” Bucky says again, almost soothingly. He resists the urge to lean down, kiss Steve’s forehead, and tell him it’s going to be okay. He knows that not to be true. This is going to hurt like a bitch.

He gets the wet cloth and wipes the area down first. Then he pours the alcohol over the pliers to sterilize them.

Finally, he tears another piece of shirt and pours alcohol over that too.

“Hope you forgive me for this,” Bucky says, gritting his teeth. He leans over Steve and then does press a quick kiss—to his jaw. “If you need to scream—scream.”

Steve’s fingers loosen on Bucky’s bicep. Bucky grits his teeth and presses the alcohol-damp cloth to Steve’s side.

Steve does, scream. 

///

“Stop moving so much,” Bucky snaps.

It’s lucky that Steve’s sitting down, because even still, he seems to be listing to the side. Bucky sits next to him, arm behind Steve’s bare back, helping prop him up.

Steve had bled a concerning amount as Bucky pulled the bullet out, but he had dug into Bucky’s forearm when Bucky had suggested a hospital. Bucky’s used to pain, but his flesh arm still seems to be regaining feeling from the moment.

There’s bandages wrapped tightly around Steve’s middle and Steve is sweaty and exhausted besides. Natasha and Bucky had forced him to drink a good quarter of the bottle of vodka, just to get through the pain, while Clint ducked out to find painkillers for him and Sam.

“‘m not moving,” Steve slurs slightly, leaning more heavily into Bucky than Bucky thinks he otherwise would have. He smells slightly metallic, like blood, but also like sweat and leftover adrenaline. Bucky wants to tuck his face into Steve’s neck and breathe him in, dirt, exhaustion and all.

Instead, he tries to help situate Steve so he doesn’t slide off the couch.

“How did this happen?” Bruce asks, voice tight. He’s tired too.

Bucky looks around the room—Sam, now stretched out and unconscious, bandages wrapped around his stomach, on the other long table, Tony, pacing, Natasha coiled tightly against one of the metal tables, and Bruce, hands shaking as he gathers all of the dirtied, used medical equipment—and the tension ripples down his spine. It’s palpable in the air, something he could bite through.

“We planned for this,” Tony mutters. “It shouldn’t have—there shouldn’t have been a guard there but—”

“Shouldn’t have?” Bruce snaps. “We were running a job on _shouldn’t have_?”

“You were there with us,” Tony snaps back now, stopping his pacing and staring at Bruce accusingly. “We ran the numbers, we tracked all the guards. Why didn’t you stop us then, huh? This shit _happens_.”

“ _A kid almost got shot, Tony_ ,” Bruce splutters and Tony reels back, like he’s been hit.

Bucky’s throat goes a little dry. He stays out of these things, but he has to ask—

“Are they okay?”

He had gotten to the scene after everything had happened. He had caught Tony, winded, and Clint, a little battered, but still whole, throwing suitcases into the back of the armored vehicle.

Steve, clutching his side, had been bent over some teenager, face contorted with worry and fear. Behind him, someone lay in a pool of his own blood, and to the side, Bruce and Natasha were trying to haul Sam’s unconscious body up between them.

“He’ll live,” Natasha says, voice low. “Got knocked out pretty badly, but he was alive.”

There’s a silence that cuts through the room, thick and unnerving. In all of the jobs they’ve run together, they’ve never had innocent casualties. They’re better than this usually—a few scrapes, a guard blasted off their feet, property damage, cutting it close here, a laugh there. But this—

“We left a mess,” Steve says and he sounds slightly more coherent this time. “We almost got a kid _killed_.”

“Steve,” Bucky mutters, strengthening his grip behind him, but Steve shakes his head.

“I told you,” Steve says and this time looks directly at Tony, eyes narrowed. “I fucking _told you_.”

“What, so this is my fault now?” Tony asks, rigid.

“ _This_ is what happens when you don’t know what you’re doing or why. We need to know where we’re going and _who_ is asking us to go there,” Steve says, through gritted teeth. “We can’t afford—this. These margins. A kid almost _died_.”

“Did I tell you to take this job, Cap?” Tony says, angrily. He seems so angry, he’s heaving. “No, really. You get the message, you decide to lead the team. Did I tell you, hey, Rogers, you have to take a shady assignment from a shady organization you know nothing about?”

“ _People have agendas, Tony_ ,” Steve says loudly.

“ _Did I hold a gun to you head?_ ” Tony shouts. He lets out a frustrated kind of yell and shoves everything off of the table nearest to him. The sounds go clattering around the warehouse, violently echoing into the empty air—screwdrivers and bottles and cans and a whole First Aid Kit clanging to the ground, rolling noisily.

It makes Bucky’s blood spike, the hairs stand up at the back of his neck. His anxiety surges. He digs his fingers into Steve’s lower back and Steve tenses next to him, seemingly swallows back a noise.

“We should have had a contingency plan,” Steve says. “We don’t know anything about them—LEVIATHAN. We don’t know who they are or what they want from us. If we get a kid killed, do you think _they_ care?”

“I don’t know how the two are related,” Tony says, frustrated. “What do they have to do with the mess _we_ made.”

“They know _everything_ about us, Tony,” Steve says emphatically. “And we know _nothing_. We’re running these jobs _for_ them, but you know whose ass is on the line if we get caught? _Ours_. We have to know why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

“Why does it _matter_?” Tony asks, breathing noisily and turning back to Steve. “You said it yourself, Cap—fuck capitalism, fuck Society, fuck all of these billionaires and corporations and rich digesting the poor and going to bed at night, thinking they’ve _earned_ it. So this group comes and they give us the targets to hit and when to hit them—isn’t that what we’ve been doing? Are we doing anything we wouldn’t be doing otherwise? Why isn’t it enough that we steal from the rich?”

“This wasn’t a casino or some billionaire’s home,” Steve says. He tries to get up and Bucky grunts, trying to bring him back down. “Why can’t you see that? This was—public. This was somewhere we should never have _been_. Not with guns. We’re not _murderers_.”

“ _We were doing a job_!” Tony shouts, kicking the edge of the table leg and cursing in frustration as it ends up reverberating through his leg.

“Shut up, both of you,” Natasha says, as Steve tries to lurch to his feet.

“Sit the _fuck_ down,” Bucky growls at Steve and shoves him back.

“Steve—Tony’s right. We got a job, we accepted the job, we have to deal with the fucking consequences of the job,” Natasha says. She gets to her feet, arms crossed tightly at her chest, her eyes narrow and dangerous at both of them. “Should we have asked questions first? Sure. Could we have planned better? Asked to take something else, where the stakes weren’t that high? Probably. But we didn’t and things got out of hand—things fucked up and we didn’t mean for it to. Now we have to _deal_ with that, but taking it out on all of us won’t change the fact.”

“ _Thank you_ ,” Tony hisses.

Natasha whirls on him.

“And you—” she says, voice sharp. “Stop being a willfully ignorant ass. Steve’s right too. We got into this because of the fun of it. This group—LEVIATHAN—it didn’t matter to us then, who they were or why they wanted us to do what they want, but it matters now. Someone died because of our job, Stark. A kid almost died. Wilson is knocked out, with a fucking third degree electrical burn to his stomach. Barnes had to pull a fucking bullet from Steve’s side with pliers. So what? We drop off the gold bars at the deposit site and in a week we see our cuts come through? Who are we giving the gold to? And why? Who’s pulling our strings, Tony? What are they going to make us fall for next? If I’m going to risk killing an innocent kid once a month, I better as hell know it’s worth it.”

Tony opens his mouth to say something, shaking from the need to address one or all of Natasha’s points. He looks so unspeakably angry that Bucky thinks he’s liable to combust any moment now and he wonders what that would look like—if Tony Stark explodes, does he disintegrate into dust or is it a bunch of strips of metallic ribbon with pithy quips engraved into the sides?

And then he wonders—why is he being so stubborn about this? What is it about needing to believe in this organization, or this cause, that’s making Tony so stubbornly unhinged?

“I wouldn’t mind,” Bruce says quietly, into the pregnant silence. “Getting some answers. It’s not the worth idea, Tony—it doesn’t mean we stop what we’re doing, we just. Are smarter about it.”

Maybe that’s it, Bucky thinks. Maybe Stark thinks that if you look a gift horse too closely in the mouth, he’ll find out it’s been a fever dream all along.

Tony seems to deflate at that.

“Fine!” he says. “Fine, get your answers! You’re all so hellbent in wrecking a good thing—fine. Whatever. No one ever listens to me, so do what you want—but leave me out of it.”

He turns on his heels to storm out, only he gets clipped in the shoulder by Clint, who barrels into him on his way in.

“Guys,” Clint pants, winded. “I got one of every kind of painkiller. Also Pierce is on TV again and he’s offering a reward for our arrest.”  
  
  
“There’s no place for criminals in our Society,” Alexander Pierce says, on the screen. “We have a social contract here. It’s our duty to protect our citizens and that doesn’t include these—hooligans, whoever they are, running around, robbing people, breaking into banks, shooting our finest. We need to guarantee safety. A mother should be able to leave her home and not fear someone’s going to break in and steal what’s left of her valuables.”

There’s some noise around him, generally positive. He moves and brings his mouth closer to the microphone, his face lined with cold fury.

“We honor the guard who died today, in this bank robbery gone wrong. We do not know who did this, but I assure you,” Alexander Pierce says. “We will find out. But for now, this has to stop. We must show the criminal gangs there is no space in Society for them. So I’m proud to launch the HYDRA Act, a revolutionary piece of legislation which will give our police unprecedented power to enforce anti-crime measures to keep our communities safe.”

Steve lets out a pained wheeze next to Bucky’s ear, so he turns away from the makeshift TV monitor. He presses a hand to Steve’s temple and his palm comes away slick with sweat.

“Hey,” Bucky murmurs. “You’re burning up.”

Steve grits his teeth and shakes his head.

“I’m fine,” he says. He’s unable to keep the tremor out of his voice and even if he had, Bucky can feel it in his limbs. “I can go all day.”

Bucky watches him closely and it doesn’t escape him—the gloss at his forehead, how his eyes keep flickering between glassy and something that’s almost alert, but not quite.

There’s a hard lump somewhere between Bucky’s throat and the top of his chest.

Alexander Pierce says something else on the screen—Bucky doesn’t listen and he doesn’t care—and Steve tries to lean forward, then lists to the side again, slumping against Bucky.

“Shit, sorry—I—”

“Okay,” Bucky says then. He’s maybe more aggressive than he means to be, but sometimes a person is just too stupid and too stubborn to be gentle with. “Come on. We’re leaving.”

“What?” Steve blinks up at him.

“You need rest and you’re not getting it here,” Bucky says, voice hard. “So we’re leaving.”

He uses all of his strength to heave Steve up, carrying the majority of Steve’s weight onto his shoulders.

“Bucky—I can’t,” Steve tried to protest, but he’s wincing too much to finish his thought. “Sam—”

“Clint and I will stay,” Natasha says, turning on her heels. “Go. Rest.”

Steve tries to open his mouth again, but Bucky’s had enough. He starts dragging him forcibly across the warehouse floor.

“Where do you live?” Bucky asks.

“Prospect Heights,” Steve winces.

Bucky holds onto his back, then props Steve up against the wall for a second. He shrugs out of his leather jacket and helps place it across Steve’s bare shoulders. Then he eases him back off the wall, his arm around Steve’s lower back, Steve’s arm across his shoulder.

“Okay,” Bucky says and makes a calculated decision. He takes a breath. “My place is closer.”

///

Ironically, Bucky drives a beat up Jetta that he hasn’t quite gotten around to souping up in his spare time. He prefers to separate business from pleasure, although he supposes he wouldn’t call the way he has to open the trunk and tinker with the engine once a month to keep the damn thing from dying a pleasure, really. Still, it’s this old blue color that he kind of likes and he inherited the damn thing from his old man besides, back when he was still around.

He opens the door and helps Steve carefully in, leaning over him to insert the buckle.

“You smell like—bubblegum,” Steve murmurs, although Bucky thinks he’s misheard at first.

When he moves away, he can see Steve’s eyes, hazy, watching him closely. He doesn’t like what he sees there. There’s a distance that Bucky wants, almost desperately, for him to come back from.

“Stay with me, Rogers,” Bucky says, quietly.

“Bubblegum,” Steve smiles.

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “I’ll get you some when we get home, all right?”

Steve nods and then lets his head fall back against the headrest.

Bucky closes the door and swallows the nerves that constrict his throat. He gets into the driver’s side and, as he often does, drives. 

///

Bucky lives on the third floor of a ramshackle building in the lower end of Midwood, across from a 24 hour laundromat and a pizza place that he’s fairly certain is a front for the Russian mob. It doesn’t have the telltale signs of Society around here—much less shiny chrome and flashing holograms of the week. The buildings aren’t brightly lit advertisements for the next fad and there are no androids standing at the corners, with their multicolored eyes and vacuous expressions, trying to suck you in, body and soul, to whatever the latest Stark creation is.

No, in Midwood, it’s still old, crumbling facades of buildings that will never be repaired, fire escapes completely rusted through, and the occasional flicker of a neon sign, reflected back in the slick, wet asphalt after a week of rain. It’s a shithole, really, but that’s why Bucky likes it.

He parks his piece of shit car a block down, in a spot that’s close to a fire hydrant, but, he estimates, not close enough to get a ticket from whatever band of Society-stamped pigs are calling themselves the police nowadays.

“Come on,” Bucky says and gets a hand behind Steve’s back to help him out of the car. He kicks the door shut and it rattles as it slams into place.

“You’re not gonna lock it?” Steve murmurs, leaning heavily against Bucky.

“Anyone who wants is welcome to it,” Bucky mutters. He readjusts Steve under him again and then slowly, the two of them make it down the block, through the locked front door, and up the three flights of stairs to Bucky’s place.  
  
  
Bucky kicks the door shut behind them and remembers to lock it before switching on the light. It struggles for a moment before buzzing into life—a pale, fluorescent, blue bathing the two of them. It’s kind of depressing, but everything around here is. Society hasn’t come knocking on Midwood yet, although he’s pretty sure Stark Industries is about to buy out parts of Flatbush, and Midwood is just a hop, skip, and busted subway ride away.

Anyway, he doesn’t pay attention to that stuff, really. He keeps his head down, Bucky Barnes, pays his rent and only comes back to his place when he needs to. He doesn’t have an emotional attachment to this building, anyway. This wasn’t where he grew up.

“Need to change your bandages,” Bucky says.

He looks around his apartment—it’s clean because he’s a clean person, but also because he doesn’t spend a whole lotta time here. There’s a living room and a kitchen and a bathroom, and a short hallway leading to the single bedroom. The furniture is sparse and the decoration is nonexistent. The only thing Bucky likes about living here is looking out the window during sunsets and seeing Brooklyn glow in the neon colors of the setting sun.

“Not making a move on you, I swear,” he grunts as he maneuvers Steve through the living room and down the hallway. “But if you’re gonna fall asleep, better be on a bed.”

“Wouldn’t care if you did,” Steve mutters, somewhere near the vicinity of Bucky’s shoulder.

Bucky pretends not to hear that, although his heart ticks traitorously somewhere beneath his collarbone. They cross into his small, spartan bedroom and Bucky doesn’t bother turning on the light before easing Steve onto the edge of the bed. The leather jacket slides off as Steve jostles.

“Don’t go,” Steve says at once, trying to hold onto Bucky, but Bucky runs both his flesh and metal hands over Steve’s bare, cool shoulders.

“Just going to get more bandages and a wet cloth,” he says. “Can you stay upright?”

Steve looks dubious, long eyelashes fluttering in the glow of the pale moonlight that’s barely illuminating half of the room. Bucky grabs some pillows and stacks them behind Steve, just in case. If he does fall over, it will be softly.

He curses as he gathers the supplies from his bathroom—more alcohol, a dry cloth, a cloth he runs under the water, and a roll of fresh bandages. He comes back into the room and dumps them on the bed next to Steve before doubling back to the kitchen. When he comes back, it’s with a glass of water.

“Vodka?” Steve says brightly.

“Dihydrogen oxide,” Bucky says, with a half-twisted grin. When Steve frowns, it’s so disarmingly soft and silly that Bucky takes pity on him. “Water. I like chemistry.”

“Nerd,” Steve says, but gratefully takes the glass from him.

“Can I unwrap you?” Bucky asks, gesturing to the stained bandages wrapped around Steve’s midsection.

Steve nods while finishing the glass.

Bucky doesn’t wait for him to move. Steve being on the bed is the perfect height for him. He kneels by Steve’s feet, where he’s eye level with Steve’s chest. When he looks up, Steve’s watching him carefully, with blue eyes glowing softly in the dark. From down here, he looks nothing like he does by the light of day. He’s a smudge of himself, someone with soft lines and tired eyes that Bucky could touch. His shoulders are nowhere near his ears, his mouth curved down in the faintest of frowns. That space between his eyebrows, always furrowed, is smoothed out. Steve breathes in and his breath hitches, minutely, on the pain, and then he exhales in a gentle, smooth motion. Bucky can see his chest rise and fall, just as closely as he can feel it. He tries not to let it affect him, but it ruffles something inside that he’s thought untouchable. Here, by Steve’s feet, he could just press his forehead to this other person’s sternum and let his eyes fall shut.

He doesn’t, for better or worse.

It’s quiet when he reaches for the stained bandages, quiet as he unwinds them from Steve’s middle, one loop at a time. They don’t talk, but Bucky can feel the air shift between them, their breathing synchronizing softly, each time Bucky’s fingers slip against Steve’s chilled skin. It’s not sexy, or at least it shouldn’t be. He lets the dirty bandages slide to the floor and he takes the damp cloth and wipes away the dried blood.

Steve takes in a sharp breath as the cloth catches on his wound, no matter how gentle Bucky tries to be. The thought of it makes Bucky hesitate, his fingers shaking when they would otherwise be steady.

“It’s okay,” Steve whispers, breaking the tentative silence between them. “You’re doing so good, Buck.”

It sweeps through him a little more than he’d like for it to. Bucky takes in a sharp breath through his nose, clenches his jaw, and tries again.  
  
  
When he pours more alcohol onto the clean cloth, Steve tenses under him.

“Breathe in with me,” Bucky says quietly. “Can you do that, Steve?”

Steve’s face is tight with pain as he nods.

“Eyes on me,” Bucky says. “In and out.”

There’s a part of him that remembers this, from a different lifetime—one breath in and one breath out, another in, and another exhale. _If that doesn’t work, James_ , his doctor had told him once, a long time ago, _Then try listening to music._

Bucky doesn’t have music with him now, so he does what he can. He hums, something low and sweet. Steve breathes with him—in and out, in and out.  
  
  
Steve’s eyes don’t leave him as he works and when he presses the alcohol-damp cloth to the wound, Steve lets out a half-strangled hiss that curdles in Bucky’s stomach. Steve’s hand is on his shoulder now, grasping at Bucky’s metal arm as he tries not to writhe under the pain—one breath in and one breath out.

Bucky feels the compulsion to apologize—he doesn’t know why. He wants to take his palm and press it to Steve’s forehead; wipe away the sweat and pain. He works the cloth instead, slowly, almost tenderly.

“There,” Bucky whispers, after a minute. “All done. The worst part is over.”

Steve still doesn’t let go and that’s okay too. Bucky sets this cloth on the floor, and then he has to stand.

He looks to Steve wordlessly and Steve seems to understand, despite it all. He scoots back just enough for Bucky to straddle him at the bed’s edge. Bucky takes the new bandages and starting at Steve’s side, carefully, gently begins wrapping him back up.

He’s silent, until Steve looks up at him.

“Can you hum again?” he asks, so quietly Bucky almost doesn’t hear him.

“Okay,” Bucky says, after a moment. He hums something that’s been caught in his mind for a few weeks now. It sounds like what he hears whenever he looks at Steve.  
  
  
The movement is soft and methodic, soothing in a mindless kind of way. He doesn’t realize when he’s done, how quickly he’s breathing. He does notice Steve’s hand to his lower back, the way Steve’s head is tilted back, looking up at him.

“How does it feel?” Bucky asks. His voice is barely a whisper; it’s swallowed by the dark of the room.

“All better,” Steve says and he, too, barely disturbs the cotton soft silence between them.

They stay like that, motionless, breathing quietly, in tandem, and it’s only when a cloud shifts outside and the moonlight flickers between them that Bucky realizes he has his hands on Steve’s shoulders.

“Tell me,” Steve says quietly, too quietly, “if you don’t want this.”

It’s against Bucky’s better judgment—all of it, literally all of it—but he can’t deny the hunger that licks up his stomach at that moment, couldn’t even if he had half a mind to.

“I want this,” Bucky says roughly.

Then, more gently.

“I want this,” he repeats, before closing the space between them.  
  
  
Even like this—injured and half-loopy, Steve kisses like he does everything—as though he’s put everything on the line for this. His hands move up under Bucky’s shirt quickly, his movements as frantic as his kiss is thorough. Bucky moves against that, their mouths fitting together perfectly; he swallows kiss after kiss like he’s thirsty for it. Steve opens his mouth and Bucky licks in, tasting alcohol and blood and kissing him deeper for it, as though he’s trying to find the hidden meaning here, that piece of Steve Rogers he’s never given anyone.

Steve lets out a sound like a starved man might and he paws at Bucky’s shirt, dragging down at his neckline as though he can get rid of it faster that way. Bucky moves closer to him and Steve lets go of the collar, sliding his hands underneath Bucky’s shirt instead. Bucky nearly freezes there, the rough of Steve’s palms against his skin so unfamiliar and so terribly good, he nearly bites down into Steve’s lips to keep from being overwhelmed. Is this what it means to be touch starved? he wonders dimly, in the back of his mind, a part to be examined at length another time.

Bucky breaks the kiss to breathe, but then nudges Steve’s jaw up, kissing down his throat until he gets to that spot, just below his collarbone, that area he’s been eyeing for months now, ink biting into Steve’s fair skin, writing that Bucky can’t read in the dark but that he can trace with his mouth. Here, just above Steve’s heart, Bucky can feel it beating through his heated skin, the rapid thudding against his mouth, as though here, above this very spot, he can find what Steve has been holding close to his chest.

It’s too much—for him and for Steve.

Steve finds the scars at his back and then at the joints to his metal shoulder and he doesn’t mean to press into them, but he does. Bucky makes a kind of keening sound into Steve’s chest and that, too, is too much.

All of this is too much, in a way that’s quickly overwhelming him. He’s so hard he can barely think, but that’s not the half of it. It’s blurring him at the edges, this feeling of drowning.

He gasps against Steve’s skin and they stop, together, but it’s not for lack of want. Bucky can feel that between them, how unbearably hard they both are, Bucky on Steve’s lap and Steve arching up into him.

“You’re hurt,” Bucky murmurs and Steve nudges him back up so he can kiss him again.

It feels like breathing air back into his lungs, so Bucky abandons Steve’s side and kneels here instead, hands framing Steve’s facing, knees to either side of his waist, drinking him in as they kiss.

His heart beats between them too fast, a loose, painful, aching thing. He’s going out of his mind, although with what he couldn’t say.

“I want this,” Steve repeats and his voice is so close to wrecked, it catches in Bucky’s throat.

“You’re hurt,” Bucky repeats. “And drunk.”

He’s almost drunk himself, although not on alcohol.  
  
“‘m not drunk,” Steve says hoarsely into Bucky’s mouth. “It’s a flesh wound.”

That makes—Jesus Christ, that makes Bucky laugh. No, really, in the middle of all of this—whatever the fuck it is they’re doing, his chest tight with feeling, with everything else tight with need—Bucky nearly throws his head back and laughs because Steve Rogers is a complete little _shit_.

“God,” Bucky rasps and bites into Steve’s lips. Steve lets out a little moan so he does it again, a little rougher this time. “I can’t _stand_ you.”

He pushes Steve back then, by the shoulders and Steve flops down onto the bed. His arms go sprawling out from his body, wide, like he’s some six foot two starfish building like a fucking goddamned tank. His eyes flutter shut, his golden hair a sweaty mess—everywhere.

“You could at least blow me,” Steve says, mildly. “I wouldn’t mind that.”

“You fucking moron,” Bucky says, with no heat. “You complete, utter fool.”

“That seems—aggressive,” Steve sighs. “Given the situation.”

“I’ll show you the fucking situation,” Bucky growls.

He crawls off of Steve and shrugs out of his shirt and then his pants. Then he crawls back up onto the bed. He unbuttons Steve’s pants and Steve manages to lift his hips with a little wheeze of pain while Bucky slides them off of him and off the bed.

“There,” Bucky says. “Now we’re both in our underwear. Happy?”

“Not really,” Steve says. “I’m still hard.”

Bucky rolls his eyes.

“I’m not risking you rupturing—whatever because you want to get laid, Rogers,” he says.

What he doesn’t mention, of course, is that there’s nothing he’d like more than to get his mouth around Steve’s cock. But anyway, that’s maybe for another time, when Steve isn’t hopped up on alcohol and painkillers—isn’t he not supposed to mix those? Whatever—with a fucking _bullet wound_ in his side.

“Up the bed,” Bucky instructs.

With some difficulty, he manages to half-haul Steve up the bed toward the pillows. He gets him positioned onto his back and then onto his side when Steve complains he doesn’t like that position.

He tucks Steve in under the covers and when he goes to move, Steve’s hand darts out to grab his wrist.

“Stay with me,” Steve pleads.

Bucky rolls his eyes and tries not to break his teeth on whatever this fucking sentiment is that’s threatening to pull him under. Steve fucking Rogers and his stupid fucking goddamned, sky blue eyes.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says through gritted teeth. “It’s my fucking bed.”

He gets up though, takes all of the dirty bandages and cloths to the bathroom and dumps all of them into the trash. Then he washes his hands, washes his face, and comes back.

He crawls into bed on the other side of Steve, facing him, as it were.

Steve’s already halfway to wherever he needs to be, but he still reaches for him. Well, Bucky’s a fucking moron, but his heart reacts in a way that he’s still quite not used to. He listens to it, despite his better judgement, and slides closer until Steve’s hand is tucked into his hair.

He reaches forward for him, mouth tilted up, and Bucky meets him halfway.

They kiss there, under the covers, with moonlight dappled across the bedspread.

The window, open just enough, lets in a cool breeze, that washes over them, raising gooseflesh between their nearly overheated bodies.

Still, Steve doesn’t let go and Bucky doesn’t try to move away.

Instead, he moves forward, pressing kisses to Steve’s chin and then his jaw, his cheek, and his nose, that spot under his jaw, that place where the ink starts at his clavicle.

Steve’s breathing grows shallow and then it starts growing deeper.

Bucky kisses him on the mouth, one last time, and when they both fall asleep, it’s with Steve’s arm around Bucky’s back and Bucky’s flesh hand pressed against Steve’s chest.

It’s the longest and calmest sleep Bucky has in weeks. 

[ . . . ]


	7. 007. [ HQ ]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha grins at that and pushes herself off of her pillar. 
> 
> “Well it’s about time,” she says. “I was starting to get bored.”
> 
> In truth, so was Steve. Let him stand still too long and he starts to drive himself a little crazy.
> 
> “Whatever happens, Cap,” Sam says—he’s all patched up now, with a grin on his face, he’s easy like that, Sam Wilson, can’t keep a Falcon down. “We face it together. We ride together, we die together.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Sunday! Let's take a short breath before going once more unto the breach.

> | [21:00] **FROM: _LEVIATHAN_**  
>  |  
>  | stark industries corporate hq  
>  | midtown  
>  | september 18  
>   
> 
> 
> | [21:00] **FROM: _LEVIATHAN  
> _** |  
>  | floors 1-4 closed for renovation
> 
> | [21:01] **FROM: _LEVIATHAN_**  
>  |  
>  | ford mustang bullit  
>  | charcoal  
>  | across from the warehouse

> [ … ]

**007\. [ east flatbush, brooklyn, ny ]**

Weeks pass between the nearly botched up bank heist and their follow up assignment. The gold bars disappear, their bank accounts grow healthier, and they hear nothing from LEVIATHAN. On the TV, every chance he can get, Alexander fucking Pierce outlines his plan—rid the city of the criminals and the crimes will follow. The HYDRA Act becomes so popular, there isn’t a television channel that isn’t talking about it. The noose draws closer around their necks.  
  
  
Steve sits with his phone when he gets it, Bucky pressed into his back, his chin over Steve’s shoulder. Steve, in a white sleeveless shirt that shows the slopes of his muscles, not because he has the inclination to show off his biceps, but because Bucky can’t keep his hands off of them.

“Stark Industries,” Bucky says, reading the message. “That’s—ambitious.”

“It’s stupid,” Steve says. “It’s too big.”

“Where is all this money going?” Bucky asks.

Steve’s been asking himself the same question—not out of some kind of moral crisis, but genuine wonder. Who is LEVIATHAN and what are they using them for? If this all comes crashing down on their shoulders, who gets caught in the net—Steve and the crew he’s come to care for, or this shadowy organization with only a name and no face?

“If we’re going to do it,” Steve says, after a moment. “We have to do it right.”

Bucky presses a kiss to the back of Steve’s jaw. His knees dig into the small of Steve’s back. Steve has come to find a lot of ways he likes Bucky Barnes, in the past few weeks, but pressed against him, in nothing but underwear, is certainly one of his favorites.

“They got me a Mustang,” Bucky says with a smile.

“The horse?” Steve asks.

“Kinda,” Bucky grins. His hand scrapes down Steve’s side, stopping to gently touch the puckered skin where Steve’s wound has been healing over in a thick knot of a scar. “Does it still hurt?”

“Sometimes,” Steve admits. “Just twinges.”

“When we—?” Bucky doesn’t finish the question so Steve laughs a little and tilts his head back just enough to catch the glare into those slate blue eyes.

“No, Buck,” Steve says. “Not when we.”

Bucky takes the minute to glare at Steve some more—like, really glare at him, as though making sure he’s not lying. Then he sighs and tips his head forward to give Steve a lingering, upside down kiss.

“You have to make up with Tony,” Bucky snickers then and Steve tries to bite at his lips in retaliation. Bucky yelps and moves his mouth away and Steve regrets it almost immediately.

“He’s an ass,” Steve says, resolutely. “I have nothing to apologize for.”

“You both apologize to each other,” Bucky instructs. “You’re fucking idiots and we’re—”

Steve pauses, still watching him upside down. Even like this—Bucky’s hair half up in a bun, half down, tousled from their evening together, the sweat dried from their last round, his lips a fading red—as though he’s been thoroughly kissed, but just long enough ago that the memory of it is starting to recede—well, it makes something in Steve’s chest do a rapid, complicated sort of twist. It’s a flip, really. Bucky makes his heart flip. It’s torturous. Steve is compromised.

How early is too early to say he loves someone?

Anyway, it’s the fucking future and they’re fucking criminals, what’s love got to do with it?

“You were supposed to finish the sentence,” Bucky says, watching Steve with a bemused sort of half-smile.

“Remind me,” Steve blinks at him and Bucky gives him a sigh, like _I gotta do everything around here._

“You’re fucking idiots and we’re—”

“A team,” Steve finishes for him after a moment. That settles on him too, a little heavier than he’d like. Bucky presses a kiss to his forehead for his effort. “We’re a family.”

That seems heavy handed, but then he thinks of Sam, lying unconscious on the ground, and how that had nearly driven him out of his mind with panic. If anything fatal had happened to him, Steve would have—

“Sure,” Bucky snickers. “But mostly, we got a job to do and we can’t do that when you two have your heads stuck up your asses.”

Steve gives some kind of a growl and flips them over without a single warning.

“Hey,” Bucky protests—half-heartedly.

“I’ll show you what’s up someone’s ass,” he says, venomously.

Steve hovers over him this time, arms to either side of Bucky’s head. Bucky’s dark hair is splayed out across his shoulders—both of them. The loose curls nearly glow against pale flesh and cool metal. What a nightmare.

“Remember like, an hour ago, when I had you crying?” Steve asks.

“No,” Bucky says. “I do not recall anything of the sort.”

“You’re a goddamned bastard, Bucky Barnes,” Steve says and this makes Bucky’s face light up too fucking much. Steve leans down to kiss the wickedness off of him and Bucky wraps his legs around his waist.

Steve has yet to get tired of this. Bucky’s still loose and ready from last time. Steve nearly slides in, he barely needs the invitation. They both let out some kind of stuttered moan at the hot feeling.

“Move, Rogers,” Bucky grinds out and Steve kisses him again, harder this time, just to shut him up.

He does move, though.

They fuck, again, for the second time that night, and it’s just as good as all the other times they’ve fucked before. This time, however, Steve leaves beard burns in as many places as he can. 

///

It’s tense, to say the least. It’s in the air, between them, in some kind of unspeakable, intangible way. Steve’s shoulders are hunched up near his ears again, the way he gets when he’s anxious or defensive. He can’t help it—he barely notices it, until he feels Bucky’s metal hand press again his lower back, firmly.

Sam raises an eyebrow, but mercifully keeps his commentary to himself.

“Listen,” Steve says, through gritted teeth.

“No, me,” Tony interrupts.

Steve hears some kind of buzzing sound in the back of his head. His jaw ticks. His heart rate picks up, and not in a good way.

“What?” Steve asks, finally.

He gives Tony what is the approximation of a pained grimace.

Natasha, for her part, leans against what was previously Bucky’s pillar, before Bucky had found his new favorite place, close to Steve. He does it because he likes watching Steve’s six. He doesn’t think Steve knows that, but he does.

It’s only been a few weeks, but if Steve Rogers pretends he wouldn’t knock a few heads off a few shoulders for Bucky Barnes, well that’d be a fucking lie.

“No, you listen to me,” Tony says. He has on his crazy magnifying lens contraption again. He looks like a fucking insect turned mad scientist. There’s something blinking on a table behind him.

“Okay,” Steve says, with that same grimace. “I’m listening, Stark.”

There’s a dense pause and then Tony slides the magnifying lense contraption off his head.

“What I said before—I’m not saying I’m wrong,” Tony says. “We’re here to do a job, at the end of the day. We either do it or we don’t, but we can’t feel bad about everything. We can’t take that on ourselves.”

Steve opens his mouth, heated, but Tony waves a hand.

“But, you weren’t wrong either, in a way.”

“What?” Steve stares at him blankly.

“I’ll take it back if you ask again,” Tony shoots and Steve holds up both of his hands. Tony lets out a sigh, rubbing a hand over his face. “I didn’t like what you said, but I couldn’t—logic it away. You’re a long-suffering martyr, which is a weird quality in the leader of a criminal enterprise, but you have intuition, Rogers, I’ll give you that. What you said got me thinking. Where did this group find us? How did they find us? Why _us_? They knew how to pinpoint exactly who they needed to make the team they wanted and they knew how to get us here in a way that no one else in their right minds would have responded to. But we would, because we’re all assholes with grudges to burn. Bruce.”

Bruce types a series of somethings into his keyboard and a projection of interconnected webs materializes in the space above the long table. The lines are in a bright green, each turn, each link, connected somehow. He types something and the lines shift, zoom in at places and zoom out at others. It’s the Internet, Steve thinks. It’s dizzying.

Steve watches with a slight frown.

“Bruce and I spent days searching, Cap,” Tony says. “He hacked into every database he could find. I used all of my—acquaintances. I pulled on threads I haven’t pulled on in years, for anything else. I wanted a morsel of information. I wanted to know _everything_ about this group. And do you know what I found?”

There’s a silence and Steve nods at the projection.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Tony says. Bruce must type in LEVIATHAN into the computer because it appears in the projection. He clicks SEARCH and the page flickers.

_No results available._

“There’s nothing,” Tony says, slightly agitated. “Not a shred of evidence they’re real. Oh sure, there are a million pages of mythology and Thomas Hobbes, but nothing else. We’ve looked for _days_.”

What Tony says isn’t surprising to him, somehow, but the knowledge sinks into him anyway, heavy, like a lead weight. Something about this has felt off to Steve for some time now. He’s not gratified to know that he’s right, but he is gratified to have evidence that he wasn’t wrong.

“Who are they?” he asks hollowly. “How did they find us?”

“I don’t know,” Tony says, shaking his head. “There’s nothing to base anything on. They could be benevolent and they could be malevolent, there’s just no way to know. But. If I had to guess, I’d say it doesn’t feel right. None of it does, really.”

Bruce tries a few different variations on LEVIATHAN, a few different databases. The webs in front of them pulsate. The links zoom in and zoom out, rapidly. The entire structure shifts. It tries again—running through each line, tracing each curve, like a bead going along bright, green strings of light. It shudders and comes to an absolute halt.

The lines crush into themselves and a screen appears instead, blinking.

_No results available._

“I didn’t like how the last job went down,” Tony says, eyeing the hologram blankly. “We were off our marks. We carry around loaded weapons where people can see, we can’t be off our marks like that. And I don’t like it when people shoot at my crew.”

“Your crew?” Natasha asks, eyebrow raised.

“Our crew,” Tony says, after a pause. “I don’t like when people shoot at _our_ crew. I don’t like being put in the position of having to shoot first or be shot.”

“But I thought we were criminals,” Steve can’t help himself. “I thought this is what we signed up for.”

There’s a battle that plays out across Tony’s features—ire and defensiveness, mixed with an inability to admit that he’s wrong, warring against what he knows to be the truth. Ultimately, he capitulates.

“You were right,” Tony says. “Is that what you want to hear, Cap? I was wrong and you were right.”

Steve feels Bucky’s hand again, pressing against him. A finger digs in just forcefully enough that Steve comes back down from—wherever he was. It grounds him, this single touch.

If he’s going to be the leader, he can’t also be a relentless dick.

“I don’t like it when people shoot at us either, Tony,” Steve says.

Tony pauses.

“Then we’re in agreement,” he says.

“We do this job, we do it right,” Steve says. “That means—planning. We do the research. We get on the same fucking page. We trust each other.”

He pauses.

“We do one last job for them,” Steve says, looking Tony in the face. “And then we’re out. Together.”

“I can do that,” Tony says, quickly. He points around at the room. “We can do that.”

They all look at Tony then—Clint, blinking slowly, Bruce, fingers poised above his keyboard, Sam, arms crossed at his chest, playing with his gold rings. Bucky, next to Steve, tilting his sunglasses up in a rare act of compromise.

Natasha grins at that and pushes herself off of her pillar.

“Well it’s about time,” she says. “I was starting to get bored.”

In truth, so was Steve. Let him stand still too long and he starts to drive himself a little crazy.

“Whatever happens, Cap,” Sam says—he’s all patched up now, with a grin on his face, he’s easy like that, Sam Wilson, can’t keep a Falcon down. “We face it together. We ride together, we die together.”

If Steve’s going to do anything, he’s going to do it with the people in this room. It hits him fiercely—clobbers him, really; the force of his affection for these reckless idiots around him.

“I’d rather not die, in general,” Clint offers, from the couch.

Steve shakes his head. He runs a hand through his hair, a low chuckle pulled from his gut.

“All right,” he says. “We don’t die. We get paid instead.”

There’s laughter low and relieved, through the room.

“Great,” Tony grins and whatever is behind him starts blinking faster. “In that case, let’s get started.” 

///

Steve doesn’t hesitate. This is the kind of deep, gut instinct and confidence that makes lesser men dither. Not Steve Rogers, though. When he’s made up his mind, a battering ram couldn’t bring him back down. That’s what makes him the Captain.

He types the message up.

Then, with a grim smile, he presses send.  
  


> | [17:05] **TO: _LEVIATHAN_**  
>  |  
>  | last job, then we’re done

[ . . . ]


	8. 008. [ the last heist ]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We have twenty minutes,” Steve says, skimming the darkened hallway. He feels those minutes in his pulse. They beat against his wrist, rapidly.
> 
> “Why do we always only have twenty minutes?” Sam mutters into his ear. “Have we ever considered giving ourselves an hour? Maybe two?”
> 
> “Where’s your sense of fun, Wilson?” Bucky says and Steve can hear the grin in his voice. Also something that sounds like he’s chewing bubblegum again.
> 
> “We gotta evaluate what fun means around here,” Sam grumbles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more heist for the road. Just one more chapter and the epilogue tomorrow and then the crimes will be done, but the gay will continue on. I hope you enjoy!! :)

**008\. [ stark industries hq, manhattan, ny ]**

“We’re stealing a glove?” Sam asks. He’s holding the handle of a mop, head turned to the side. His communicator, nestled under his ear, gives off a very low, barely discernible blink. “Did I get that right? All this for a glove?”

“Do you ever listen?” Tony’s voice comes into their ears. “Seriously, does anyone on this team ever listen?”

There’s a pause wherein no one really answers.

Bucky grins and adjusts his sunglasses. He can see his reflection on the outside of the Mustang and he doesn’t hate it. He adjusts his bright red polo and turns the baseball cap backward.

“How does this make my ass look?” he asks Steve.

“Are those my khakis?” Steve asks, giving him a bemused sort of slow blink.

Bucky grins.

“So, a glove,” Sam says over the device.

There’s another crackle and a sigh.

“Yeah, Wilson,” Tony answers, terribly aggrieved. “A glove. We need the glove, we need the schematics, and we need any tech surrounding it.”

“Seems like a lot of effort for a glove,” Sam mutters and that makes Tony positively squawk.

“It’s not just a _glove_ , it’s advanced, proprietary technology that converts absorbed energy into concentrated blasts and—” Tony splutters. “— _enough with the glove!_ ”

“Everyone in your positions,” Steve says, ignoring the usual bickering. “We get in, swipe the files, find the glove, grab it, get out, and no one’s the wiser.”

There’s another silence and then Sam laughs.

“Sounds easy when you take the Stark part out of it,” he says. He touches the face scrambler to make sure it’s still connected and takes the mop out of the bucket of water.

“Stark is the easy part,” Natasha finally chimes in. “It’s the rest that gets tricky.”

There’s nothing but crackling silence as everyone moves into place and then they hear Tony speak to someone, as though distantly.

“Hi, Howard Potts,” he says. “I’m here about the Internet outage?”

“Ah, Mr. Potts,” a woman’s voice comes. “They sent you quicker than expected. No one can figure out what’s going on. Entire system is down. A whole building of tech people and no one can get the wifi to turn back on.”

Somewhere, in a warehouse in Brooklyn, Bruce Banner grins.  
  
“That’s the problem with corporate,” Tony chuckles to the receptionist. “Everyone’s in accounting and no one knows how to build their own computer network.”

There’s faint laughter.

 “Let me show you upstairs,” the woman says.

They can hear Tony making small talk with the receptionist as she leads him past the lobby, inside Stark Industries.

“Apparently bad hair dye is all you need to not recognize Howard Stark’s son, huh?” Clint mumbles into the system.

“People see what they want,” Bruce answers. They can hear the faint, tell-tale sound of Bruce’s keys clacking in the background. “You have thirty minutes before the network comes back online, Tony.”

“Plenty of time,” Natasha answers for him. She adjusts her badge and the dumb cap hiding her red hair. She comes through the large glass doors to a different desk, this one manned by a security guard. “Hey there. I’m here for the night shift.”

The guard looks up at her, his eyebrows furrowing.

“That’s usually Coulson’s shift,” the guard says, with a frown.

“Guess he’s out sick,” Natasha says, with a shrug. “Some kinda bug.”

“Ah shit. That time of year, I guess. You got ID?” the security guard asks and Natasha hands over her forged identification card. “Thumbprint, please.”

“Got it,” Bruce’s voice comes into her ear.

She presses her thumb to the scanner and Bruce’s keys clack in her ear. There’s a nervy second where the scanner pauses, as though glitching—but then it blinks green.

“Great,” the guard says. “Up the elevator, fourteenth floor. Security bank is all the way down the hallway. It’ll take your ID.”

“Thanks,” Natasha grins at him. The man goes a little pink around the edges.

She gets in the elevator and pushes the button for fourteen.

“All right,” Steve says. He turns to Bucky, who grins. Despite the usual, tell-tale thrum of adrenaline, despite the fast, almost unwieldy moving pieces, and despite the high stakes of boldly robbing a place like Stark Industries, under Howard Stark’s own nose, he can’t help it. Bucky looks stupidly cute in his dumb, backwards cap, looking all pleased, like he’s gone and done something. Steve leans forward and gives him one last firm, parting kiss. “You’re up, Buck.”

Bucky seems to glow under the attention, or maybe that’s just what he always looks like to Steve. Either way, he grabs a delivery bag and four boxes of pizza from the back seat of his beautiful, borrowed Mustang. Too bad the leather’s going to smell like cheese for the next two weeks.

“Did someone order four boxes of pizza?” Bucky grins.

“Me,” Clint says mournfully, from somewhere.

Bucky walks up to the building and slips inside. Steve watches him go and thinks: his ass _does_ look good in my khakis.

Then he turns and adjusts his tie in the window of the Mustang.

///

The hallways are mostly empty, eerie in the way that buildings get once it’s dark outside and most of the employees have gone home. There are still people in their offices, burning the late fuel; tech and capitalism wait for no man, after all. Mostly though, it’s just the sound of the others breathing in his ears, distant muttering as they talk to whoever they run into on their end of the plan, and the swish of the wet mop against the tiled floor. He hums to himself as he does it, keeping an eye around the corners and nodding to suits as they come and go.

A whole building, armed to the teeth with security and doors that need clearance, and he just walked in wearing a janitor’s uniform. No one ever notices the help.

He looks up at a wall of corporate pictures, bemused to see Howard Stark’s face in the middle. That’s Tony in ten, fifteen years and he makes a note to himself to tell the guy with severe daddy issues just that, once he gets the chance. He shakes his head and returns to the task.

After a few minutes of quiet mopping in the same place, he’s almost startled to feel someone tap his shoulder.

“Hey,” a man with a thin mustache says. “You the new night janitor?”

“That’s me,” Sam says.

“Great,” the man says and he sounds a bit harried this time. He has those crazy eyes, the ones that say someone just fucked up big time and if no one helps, I’m the one whose ass is on the line. “I need you to come with me. Some idiot just spilled four pizzas all over our computer bank.”

“That sounds like a mess,” Sam says.

“It’s a disaster,” the man says and this time the panic is clear. “He tried to help and somehow deleted half of our project. The entire network is fucking down and we don’t know how to get _any_ of it back.”

“Shit,” Sam says, just barely keeping from laughing. “Bet your boss won’t be too happy about that.”

The man does a full body shudder and this time the crazed look takes on an edge, something close to mania, or an utter breakdown.

“Howard Stark is not a man you want to piss off,” the man says, sweating.

“Aw,” Tony’s voice comes over the comms. “But that’s all I like to do.”

“Lead the way,” Sam says to the man and this time he does grin.

///

“You’re the new hire?” the receptionist asks, looking up at him. She has bright teal hair and two ears full of earrings. Honestly, not what he was expecting, although he supposes there has to be some perks of manning a corporate desk in the middle of the night.

“That’s me,” Steve says, leaning against the counter. “Nick Fury.”

“You have your work cut out for you, Nick,” the woman says with a wry smile. Her nails are a bright yellow against her keyboard. “Stark goes through project managers the way people go through socks. Not to scare you off or anything. This place is a fucking nightmare.”

Steve gives her a smile.

“I’m used to working with difficult personalities,” he says.

“That’s one way to put it,” the receptionist says. She hands him a Starkpad. “Sign in here and I’ll take you up to fourteen. That’s where the design team is. You got all of your waivers and NDAs signed and sent in?”

“That’s an affirmative, Cap,” Bruce says in Steve’s ear.

“Ah yes, I see them all here now,” the woman says, checking her screen. Steve hands the tablet back to her. “Thanks. All right, Nick. After me.”

Steve scans the cavernous lobby as he follows the woman past the security turnstiles, toward a bank of elevators that are shiny chrome. Their shoes clack against the slick tiled floor, the sound echoing into the relatively empty space. It’s all shiny black tiles, and charcoal-colored chrome in here, with glass walls lit in bright neon colors—pinks and blues, yellows and greens. There are holograms flickering at different neon-colored portals, large enough for humans to fit into. It’s like something out of a sci fi movie, but Steve guesses that’s what happens when your company is responsible for creating a sci fi kinda future.

“Mr. Stark’s been all hush hush about this,” Steve says lightly as the woman presses 14 into the console. She jangles even as she stands there, a solid six inches of bangles lined up on either arm. “Had to go through about ten different interviews to get here.”

The woman watches the elevator come down with half a smile.

“Everything’s hush hush around here,” she says. “Don’t know what they’re working on and no one will tell you. But rumor has it, it’s something big.”

“Something big?” Steve asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Guess everything’s big, in a way. You find out,” the receptionist smiles. “And you tell me.”

The elevator reaches the first floor and opens with a ding.

“But I will say,” the woman with the teal hair says as Steve shuffles in. “It’s big enough they hired extra security. Because Stark has rivals and they’ll do anything they can to get a hold of it.”

Steve’s heart beats rapidly somewhere under his clavicle.

The elevator door slides shut.

///

“Here’s the whole network bank,” a young man with brown hair says.

“That’s a lot of blinking lights,” Tony replies, raising an eyebrow.

The room is dark, except for the moonlight streaming in through the entire wall of windows and two dozen blinking lights all over the room. It’s kind of a seizure hazard, in all honesty.

“No one knows what’s wrong,” the young man says, voice tight. “But everything’s at a halt until then—no one can access any of the networks. Half of design is in a full-blown panic. There are deadlines, Mr. Potts. The gonna-have-heads-rolling kind of deadline if people don’t make them. It’s not supposed to be doing this. If we don’t get it back up—it’s going to be bad.”

Tony can feel the anxiety rolling off of this kid.

“Tsk,” he says as he steps into the room. “I’m no genius, of course. But I’ll see what I can do.”

///

“What a mess,” Sam says, taking the pizza boxes and stuffing them into the large trash bin attached to his janitorial cart. “Where’s the asshole who did this anyway?”

“The delivery driver?” the man with a thin mustache said. He looks—disgruntled. There’s an entire room of panicking developers, everyone is hungry, and the air smells like unwashed sweat, quickly spiraling anxiety, cheese, and pizza sauce. Sam hopes he doesn’t pass out on the clock. “He made a bunch of apologies and left to get more pizza, I guess. I don’t fucking know. God. This is going to take all night to recover. I’m tearing out my hair here.”

“Your boss out for the night?” Sam asks, mopping up the table.

“No one ever knows where Stark is,” the man says with disgust. “Hopefully he’s in another fucking country.”

Sam finishes mopping.

“Hey, you know where the nearest trash chute is?”

“Down the hall,” the man says and tugs at the ends of hair that will be thinning _very_ soon.

“Thanks,” Sam grins.

He wheels his cart out and down the hall.

///

“Aren’t you supposed to be in the car?” Clint mutters. He pushes his own cart, mop, trash bin, and all. On his uniform, there’s a white patch that says: BARNEY.

“A guy can never stick around for the fun around here,” Bucky says. He rummages inside the pocket of his— _Steve’s_ —khakis and pulls out a cube of bright pink bubblegum. “Want one?”

Clint makes a face.

Bucky shrugs and pops it into his mouth.

“Down the hall,” Natasha says in their ears. “Through a set of doors. Need a code and clearance access.”

Clint seems to perk up at that.

“What?” Bucky asks, watching him, slowly chewing his bubblegum.

“No one ever suspects the help,” he says and starts wheeling his cart.

///

“We have twenty minutes,” Steve says, skimming the darkened hallway. He feels those minutes in his pulse. They beat against his wrist, rapidly.

“Why do we always only have twenty minutes?” Sam mutters into his ear. “Have we ever considered giving ourselves an hour? Maybe two?”

“Where’s your sense of fun, Wilson?” Bucky says and Steve can hear the grin in his voice. Also something that sounds like he’s chewing bubblegum again.

“We gotta evaluate what fun means around here,” Sam grumbles.

Steve ignores them both and opens the glass doors into the Design Bay. Inside, it smells distinctly of pepperoni.

“Hi, I’m the new project manager,” Steve says, blinking at the barely contained chaos staring up at him. There are multiple developers crowded around three functioning computers. Someone is pressing keys on his keyboard very very very fast. The air isn’t just tense—it’s a full blown frenzy. He knows the look of panicked faces when he sees them. There’s a man with a thin mustache who looks like he’s about to lose his every single shit. “Nick Fury.”

“Fury,” the man says and grasps his hand. He’s sweating, his eyes bulging. “What do you know about systems recovery?”

“I’m a designer,” Steve blinks and the man somehow goes so pale he nearly turns into a ghost. “What did you lose?”

The man tugs at his tie and Steve is slightly concerned he’s trying to strangle himself with it.

“Schematics,” he says hoarsely. “Hundreds of schematics. Codes. Proprietary information. If we lose the blueprint for the gauntlet, my ass is toast. Howard Stark will bury me.”

“Gauntlet?” Steve says, with interest. “What gauntlet?”

The man twists his shirt between his hands.

“Show me the gauntlet,” Steve says. “I’m good with design. We work through the night, we can recreate it together.”

“It took us _years_ ,” the man says mournfully.

“I’m good,” Steve insists and the man seems to wilt under that kind of assertiveness. He’s looking for any lifesaver literally anyone is willing to throw him. “That’s why Stark hired me personally. Show me what we need to save.”

The man looks like he’s going to pass out, swaying on his feet. Steve is just about to step forward and press him again, when he nods.

“Okay,” he says. “But don’t tell anyone I showed you.”

///

“Hey,” a security guard says. He’s built like a fucking cliff face. He has at least two guns strapped to his sides and something strapped to a meaty wrist that will definitely electrically shock the first person to piss him off. “Off limits.”

“Gotta clean,” Clint says cheerfully.

“You need security clearance,” the guard says, bearing his teeth.

“I’m the night janitor,” Clint says and points to his cleaning cart of supplies.

“You can be the Queen of England for all I care,” the guard says. “You don’t got security clearance, you don’t go in.”

Clint just shrugs.

“I mean Stark’s fired people for less, but sure, if you want to tell him you’re the reason he can’t see his reflection in the glass,” Clint says. He blinks at his mop and then at the guard. “I guess I could give you the mop. Just cleaned the bathroom though, so it might smell like shit.”

The guard looks queasy at that.

“Hold on,” he says gruffly and then fingers his communicator. “Hey, I’m on 14-G. Got a night cleaner, says he wants access to the Vault to clean. I need clearance.”

There’s a crackle and Clint hears Natasha’s voice in his ear.

“Yeah,” she says dryly. “Let him in. Stark goes batshit if he can’t see his reflection on every surface.”

The guard frowns.

“That high strung?” he asks.

“You have no idea,” Natasha chuckles. “Went on a rampage last time he came back from a business trip and something didn’t go his way. Fired a whole team of security and two teams from production. Wasn’t even their faults, really, but you think Stark cares?”

“Shit,” the guard mutters.

He looks at Clint dubiously, but then finally nods. He turns to key his code in and does the retinal scan.

“Thanks,” Clint says, whistling. He’s almost through the door, when he turns. “Oh hey, by the way.”

“Yeah?” the guard says.

“Appreciate it,” Clint grins, takes out a gun, and shoots him in the head.

///

“He’s not actually dead,” Clint says as Sam drags the unconscious guard’s body to the side.

Clint props the door open with both of their cleaning carts.

“Looks like a bad burn though,” Sam mutters, his stomach twinging in empathy.

“Sometimes you gotta get shot in the face,” Clint shrugs and then blinks in surprise. “Cap?”

“What took you so long?” Steve says from inside the nearly dark room. He’s walking around the center, where a bright glass case, sitting on top of a block of steel, is wreathed in what looks like red, criss-crossed lasers.

To the side, there’s a man with a thin mustache lying unconscious on the floor.

“That guy has had a rough night,” Sam says.

“So will we if we don’t hurry,” Steve says. He frowns with a frustrated sigh. “Didn’t account for the lasers.”

“Fun fact,” a voice says from the door and the three of them startle. Bucky leans against the door with a grin, arms crossed at his chest. “You can’t feel anything when your arm is made of metal.”

///

Tony’s no hacker like Bruce, but he does know his way around a computer bank. The entire network is down, but Tony doesn’t actually need the network live for what he has to do.

The young guy leaves him to fix the connection and Tony leaves _him_ to skirt down the hallway and up two flights of stairs. He pulls up the floor plan on his watch, eyes skimming closed office doors and receptionist desks, until he pulls up in front of the one he’s looking for.

He hovers outside of a large glass office. _HOWARD STARK, CEO_ , it says, engraved into the frosted glass pane.

There’s time to deal with your childhood traumas and daddy issues, but that time is not in the middle of a time-sensitive heist.

Tony lets out a breath of curses and keys in the code to get in. In all of the years he’s known his father, he’s never once changed it. The man is cruel, but overall an idiot.  
  
  
His computer password is the same too. Tony ignores the variety of icons on the desktop and navigates through a maze of folders to find what he’s looking for. Then he minimizes it and opens SYSTEMS OPERATIONS. He types in a string of commands and the computer screen goes black. When it comes back online, it’s a bright, blank green.

“All right, Brucey,” he mutters. “You’re in.”

“It’ll take me fifteen minutes,” Bruce says.

“You have ten,” Steve replies, voice crackling over comms.  
  
  
Tony sits back, looks around the office that could have been—should have been his. Had it not all happened the way it did—the drugs and the reckless irresponsibility and the disinheritance, sure, but also the verbal abuse, the untouchable standards, the way Howard would always look at him and demand something _more_ —whatever that meant—something Tony could never fully deliver. Sometimes, the only way to break the cycle is to—well, break.

Well, whatever.

The time for parental apologies was long in his past. He rather likes using his Howard Stark-funded education to funnel illicit tech into the underground black market now.

Tony splits the screen and lets Bruce work while he goes back to that folder. He pats himself down, reaches into an inner pocket, and produces what looks like a small, silver disc.

He reaches over the desk to insert it into the tower’s microdisc slot when his arm knocks something over. It goes crashing over the edge of the desk, the sound loud and jarring into the still silence of the office. Tony curses, presses the disc in, and then scrambles to the other side.

The frame isn’t broken when he picks it up, but he takes in a sharp breath anyway.

It’s a picture of Howard and Tony, from sometime when he was a kid, during one of the only good days he can remember. It was at the aquarium and Howard had bought Tony an ice cream cone. It had been his birthday. There’s a thin crack in the corner of the glass.

It takes a moment of a ticking jaw and swallowing bile for him to pick it back up and put it back on the desk.

Tony closes his eyes and counts backwards from ten.

“Too little too late, daddio,” he says.

He copies the folder—all of it—onto his disc in spite.

///

It’s fun to watch people react when he uses his metal arm, is the thing. Bucky’s carried the damn thing around for so long he forgets it’s not normal to do things like shove your entire arm in through lasers that would melt gold. He doesn’t know what his arm is made of, really, but he knows it’s some kinda StarkTech, which is about fifteen different shades of irony.

He pops a bubble, grabs the metal glove—gauntlet, really—and pulls it out.

“Sixty seconds,” Steve says. He looks—well, not peaky, but a little stressed. His nose is flared out a little and his blue eyes are going a little wide around the edges. Bucky can almost feel his heart rate ticking up, the high-strung idiot. It’s stupid, but Bucky thinks maybe he loves him.

“Case is going to detect it’s empty in about ninety seconds, Cap,” Bruce says, a little harried himself, over the comms.

“I tried to tell y’all,” Sam says. “But you never listen.”

Steve pulls out what looks like a silver cigarette lighter from his pocket. He flips open the lid and a thin beam of green begins scanning the glove from every single fucking angle.

“This is what you guys are always doing inside?” Bucky asks. He wishes he had his earbuds in. “I’m bored.”

“Bucky,” Steve says sweetly, stressed. “Shut up.”

Clint snickers.

“Okay,” Steve says, after about thirty seconds. “Take the glove and run.”

That startles Bucky.

“What about you?”

Steve turns back to the glass case. He flips the lid on the silver rectangle shut and then pops it back open. He thumbs a button to the side this time and it projects the shape of the gauntlet back into the case. Starting from a ring at the bottom, a bright blue light starts circling, faster and faster. Bucky can see the gauntlet—a fake one—forming from the bottom up.

“I said,” Steve says, and there’s an edge to his voice this time. “Take the glove. And fucking. Run.”

///

“Five minutes,” Bruce says, also stressed.

“For you or for us?” Tony asks. He takes the disc, puts it into what looks like a case for contacts, and sticks it back in his pocket.

“Until we’re all fucked from here to hell and back, Tony,” is Bruce’s answer.

“I don’t think that answers my question, really,” Tony says.

He turns off the monitor, slips out of his father’s chair, and stops at the edge of the desk. He considers it—taking the picture, the only good memory they’ve ever had together. He doesn’t know if he wants it or if he wants to take it from his father.  
  
  
He leaves it, in the end.

Howard Stark is someone else entirely. It doesn’t really matter to Tony anymore. He has a different kind of family now and he’s not mad about it.

He turns off the lights to Howard’s office and doesn’t look back.

///

“What is this glove?” Sam asks, panting.

In retrospect, maybe it’s too late to be asking such questions.

They’re hurrying through the hallways, turning corners first and looking second.

“New tech,” Clint says, through puffs of breath. “Didn’t Tony—something something energy. Absorption.”

“There’s something I don’t like about it,” Bucky mutters, even though no one’s asked him. He has it in the pizza delivery bag. The bulge is suspicious, but if anyone finds the three of them running through the hall, a bulging bag is gonna be the least of their problems.

How much time do they have left? Steve hasn’t given them an update and that sits in Bucky’s stomach like a fucking lead balloon.

“Why do they want it so bad?” Sam asks. They skid into a stop in front of the elevators on fourteen. They pile in when it swings open and he jabs the button to take them down past the lobby, out to the parking garage. “It’s not gold and it’s not cash, so—what the fuck is it? I know LEVIATHAN doesn’t care about fucking—energy absorption.”

“It’s too much like my arm,” Bucky says. It makes him feel—not unsettled, but uncomfortable. It hits his gut in all of the wrong ways. He knows what his arm is capable of, even if he doesn’t use it for that reason.

“Does Stark make weapons of mass destruction?” Clint muses.

“Seems too late to be asking that,” Bucky mutters. He thinks about his arm again. _Yes_.

The door opens up and they scramble out into a concrete-enforced parking garage. There are expensive cars everywhere, but it’s silent otherwise. Not much traffic in or out, this late at night, thank fuck.

“I am not fucking selling a fucking glove—gauntlet, that’s going to blow up an entire country or some shit,” Sam growls.

“This was a bad idea,” Bucky says, feeling the hairs on his neck prickle up. He sees the Mustang across the garage and makes it halfway there before he feels his stomach drop. The silence of the garage hits him wrong, all too late. He’s here with two other people and he can only hear one set of footsteps.

Bucky skids to a halt, his pulse hitting the back of his throat.

He turns around at the instinct and finds Sam and Clint gone.

“It’s too late now for all that,” a voice says.

///

“Tony,” Steve says. They get into the elevator together. “Thought we’d lost you back there.”

 “Who me?” Tony asks. “What’s a little childhood trauma in the face of decades of revenge?”

“Is that what this was about?” Steve asks. He looks over at the other man then and notices—lines where there weren’t lines before, salt and pepper hair that’s both dignified and something more. Steve would never call Tony Stark old, but in the months they’ve been working together, he’s never seen him look this—worn. Cautious, marybe. Everyone has a past to contend with.

“I didn’t set up the job, Cap,” Tony says. “Came here on orders, just like the rest of you.”

“Sure,” Steve says, watching him. “But it was personal for you anyway.”

Tony shrugs and pats something in his pocket.

“Everything’s personal, in this fucked up, dog-eat-dog world. Anyway, the schematics,” he says and this time he seems almost, well, pleased. “I can alter them. Sell them on the market. We’ll make a fucking fortune and leak prized StarkTech before he gets a chance to. It’s all win/win for me.”

“Do you need the money?” Steve presses.

The elevator reaches the parking garage level.

“What I need, Cap,” Tony says, through gritted teeth. “Is to finish this job.”

Steve can understand that. He got into this for his own reasons and it’s no business to anyone else what those reasons are. He likes it, of course; likes the rush, the challenge, thrill of the fucking job. It used to be what kept him going—not the results, but the job itself. But.

But now.

He guesses he’s starting to imagine a different kind of life now, too. A motorcycle, maybe, sun against blue eyes and the wind in brown waves. A metal arm and a flesh arm, around his waist. It’s not something he’s ever thought of before, when he was up to his eyeballs in medical bills he couldn’t pay and a mother dying of an illness no Society politician or billionaire was trying to fucking solve.

Now though.

He doesn’t know that he’s done with this life, but he doesn’t know that it’s the only one he wants anymore. There are options for him; options he’s never had before.

Steve doesn’t know what this means for him next, but he understands the look on Tony’s face. He knows, better than anyone, the need for _next_ to also mean _this, but more._ Sometimes, what you need is to finish the job and prepare for the next. Sometimes, that’s all that keeps you going.

“Let’s finish the job then, Stark,” Steve says, with a grin.

The door opens and he thinks, with a certain amount of thrill: this is the best part, anyway. He loves winning.

///

There’s the span of a moment—just a single moment—before his brain catches up to what his eyes are seeing.

Then—

“Steve, Tony,” Natasha says, dryly. “It seems, we have a situation.”

Steve feels his blood run cold. Next to him, Tony comes to a very sudden halt.

There’s a gun against Natasha’s head. In fact, there’s a gun against everyone’s heads.

“It’s time we met, Captain,” an older man’s voice says. Steve knows this voice. He steps out of the shadows and it turns out, Steve knows the man too.

“Alexander Pierce,” Steve says, his mouth going dry.

The politician inclines his head with a kind, kind smile.

“Thank you so much for your service,” Pierce says. “LEVIATHAN will remember you fondly, after you’re gone.”

[ . . . ]


	9. 009. [ the best laid plans ]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All the best laid fucking plans and now they’re in a garage with ten men in suits, with glocks cocked to his team and assault rifles strapped across their fronts.
> 
> The great irony about the future is this: that everything can be done with lasers and non-lethal weapons, but there’s always some fucking asshole with an assault rifle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it--the end of the heist! This + the epilogue goes up now and then we're done! ♥

**009\. [ stark industries parking garage, manhattan, ny ]**

There’s a moment, during jobs gone wrong, when Steve feels it in his gut—an incongruous twist in the air, some electrical spark down his spine; jarring and just a hair’s breadth off. It goes crawling across his skin, makes the hair on his arms stand up. It feels like he’s on a board, suspended above water, and suddenly there’s nothing but air beneath his feet. He doesn’t notice it until it’s too late.

The air is tense with shallow breathing and the inability to move.  
  
  
All the best laid fucking plans and now they’re in a garage with ten men in suits, with glocks cocked to his team and assault rifles strapped across their fronts.

The great irony about the future is this: that everything can be done with lasers and non-lethal weapons, but there’s always some fucking asshole with an assault rifle.

“I don’t understand,” Steve says quietly, trying to find his bearings.

“Oh I think you do,” Pierce says. “It’s not that difficult, is it?”

“We’re your scapegoats,” Tony says, forcing the words out. “We were always going to be your scapegoats.”

“See, now here’s a genius!” Pierce exclaims. He stops in front of Bucky and Steve nearly lurches forward, before Tony grabs his arm and wrests him back. “The thing about politics, gentlemen—and lady, of course, I would never forget you Miss Romanova—is that it’s all a lie. The people don’t want the truth, they want whatever bullshit you feed them. So you build up a threat and then you take it down yourself. You’re a hero and, if you’re smart, you get a payday out of it.”

“HYDRA—” Steve starts and stops.

“Come, Mr. Rogers,” Pierce says, turning back to Steve. “You’re smarter than that. Or at least I think you are.”

“HYDRA,” Tony says, instead. “A serpentine sea monster.”

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Stark—Howard really did undersell you, poor boy,” Pierce shakes his head. He waves a hand around the air. He’s not strapped, of course. He doesn’t have to be. “And leviathan—a mythical...sea monster, yes I do think he’s connected the two, finally.”

The simplicity of it makes his head reel.

Steve quickly feels the ground slip away under his feet. The thing is—not just that Alexander Pierce knows them, almost intimately, not just that he has private information on all of them, enough to make them take the fall for absolutely whatever he wants; the thing is, he has them surrounded and even Steve can’t think of a way to outrun ten assault rifles.

He’s a thief, not a fucking twenty armed miracle worker.

“So what now?”

It’s not Steve and it’s not Tony—hell, it’s not even Sam.

It’s Bucky.

“Excuse me?” Pierce turns to him.

“What, you take the glove and we—take the fall? You make an example out of us?” Bucky sounds so unimpressed Steve would laugh, if his pulse wasn’t somewhere in the middle of his throat right now. _Shut up, Buck_ , he thinks.

“Well,” Pierce says, with a slightly puzzled look to his face. “Yes. You give us the glove, we use it to take out our opposition and, well, anyone we want, really, blame it on all of the _terrible_ criminal gangs infesting this city and then sell it to the highest bidder.”

There’s a pause, as though this is something that should obviously have occurred to all of them.

“What makes you think we’ll just give it to you?” Sam asks. There’s a goon who has a gun to his back. Sam glares at everyone in the garage like it is their personal fault he’s dressed like a janitor and getting held up in fluorescent lighting.

“Fine,” Pierce says, shrugging. “Then we’ll take it ourselves.”

He nods to the man marking Bucky and the man grips his flesh shoulder tightly, shoves the gun against the back of his neck.

“If you would, Mr. Barnes,” Pierce says, nastily. “I believe you have a delivery for me.”

Bucky looks at Pierce then, slate blue eyes narrow with disdain. Every line, every angle of him is poised, not just for defiance, but flagrant disrespect.

A few things occur to Steve in this moment, some important, some not: that, one, Bucky isn’t wearing his sunglasses, for once, and two, that Bucky doesn’t have his earbuds in, for once, and three, if Bucky had been in the car all along, maybe this could have all been avoided. Maybe the rest of them would have been caught, but he could have gotten away. He’s just the getaway driver. He doesn’t have to be a part of this. Steve doesn’t want him involved in this.

Steve _wants_ him to get away.

So that makes him realize that, four, whatever happens here today, he doesn’t want to get shot in the face by Alexander fucking Pierce’s henchmen without kissing Bucky one last time. And, also, he guesses, he must love him.

It’s all a bunch of big fucking revelations two seconds before someone opens fire.

///

Natasha ducks too quick for her goon, swiping his legs out under him and pulling one of her knives from her socks and driving it into his side. She rolls away just before a gunshot blasts into a Subaru, right where her head had just been.

Steve hears screaming and a round of fire that reverberates around the parking garage—bullets shattering the windows of expensive cars and a siren blaring out somewhere in the distance. It’s a cacophony of violence, the dam breaking at the mouth of a fucking river.

“ _Fuck!_ ” he shouts and ducks as a bullet blasts into the elevator door behind him. He pushes Tony out of the way and they both roll to the side, Steve going for his gun and Tony pulling something out of his pocket that looks like a hockey puck.

“ _Move!_ ” Tony shouts, although it’s unclear to who. Sam elbow checks his thug and Tony throws the black disc.

There’s something like burnt electricity that rips through the air, making every hair on Steve’s neck stand up and his teeth chatter in pain. Some kind of electric charge and a net disperses from the puck and Sam’s goon and the one trying to shoot Clint go down together, screaming as shocks hit their bodies.

One of Pierce’s thugs lunges for Steve, who only just manages to twist out of the way with a curse. He smashes into the side of a car, dropping to his knees as pain explodes along his side. He shouts in pain, but doesn’t wait to register it—he raises his gun and shoots.

The thug screams and falls to the ground, clutching his knee and Steve shoots the other one too.

“Bucky!” Steve yells, dragging himself back up, but a nasty-looking guy with bulging biceps and a fuckboy haircut grabs Bucky by the neck and tries to choke him out. Bucky struggles against him, trying to ram his elbow into the man’s solar plexus, until he nearly turns purple from the stranglehold and a gun gets shoved to his temple again. The thug, panting, leers at Steve, his finger on the trigger.

“Now, James,” Pierce shouts over the commotion. “You don’t have to die, but Rumlow can make _sure_ you do.”

Steve clutches his side, his head nearly splitting from pain. He tries to shake it off and drag himself forward, but another blast at his feet makes him stumble backwards into a cement pole.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he grunts out, the back of his knees hitting the wall.  
  
Like a nightmare, three things happen in quick succession then:

One, Natasha gets hit in the back of the head with the butt of a gun and goes down.

Two, Sam and Clint find themselves on the end of two assault rifles.

And three, Tony gets shot in the shoulder.

Tony’s pained shout echoes around the garage as his body thuds to the ground.

“ _Enough_ ,” Pierce’s voice cuts through.

Steve breathes heavily, eyes darting around the space. His neck is slick with sweat, his heart racing so fast it’s like a desperate attempt to choke him. One more plan, he thinks, desperately. There has to be—one more plan.

“You have lost,” Pierce sneers. “We have won. Now give me the fucking gauntlet and I promise you nothing more than life sentences and public humiliation.”

_One more plan_ , he begs.  
  
Steve catches Bucky’s eyes then. Bucky, panting, bearing his teeth in pain, closes his. There are purple splotches across his neck, his arm hanging uselessly by his side. He shakes his head, no, and Steve feels like they’ve lost everything.

There’s nothing else, only this: the end of a job, his team facing the barrels of assault rifles, and a sociopath with an advanced tech glove of mass destruction.

They lose.

LEVIATHAN wins.

That’s when Rumlow starts screaming.  
  
“Alexander Pierce,” a smooth voice says, punctuating the scream. “So good of you to wait for us.” 

///

From out of the shadows, melts someone Steve has seen, only once before, and never registered again. He looks like what Steve imagines a demon might look like, all black suit and dark hair pulled back, gold on his fingers and jade at his throat. There are long, thin silver chains at his ears, with hammers at the end. Green eyes look out at the wreckage and Loki Odinson—he smiles.

Rumlow staggers back from Bucky, his screams now a gurgling—there’s blood blossoming at his throat. He falls to his knees and then backwards with a crash. Bucky stumbles out of his arms and Steve shoots forward to catch him, Bucky’s weight against his chest. He feels nearly crushed with relief.

Pierce stumbles back too, then, until his back hits a solid wall of—

“Hello,” a giant blond man says. He has long hair, pulled back, tattoos crawling out from under his shirt, and muscles the size of Bucky’s head. “What did we say, last time? The Asgardians always pay their debt.”

Now from behind cars, figures emerge, each of them seemingly larger than life, every one with a single hammer pendant at their throats—a large man with a red beard and a kalashnikov, a woman with dark hair, a crooked smile, and chains in her hands, a skinny blond man with a forked beard and two glocks, and an Asian man with his hair tied up, playing with a very serrated knife.

“Thor,” Alexander Pierce says and this time he sounds very _very_ nervous. “I’m so glad you’re here. I thought we could talk.”

“Funny,” Loki says, lazily. He watches Pierce like a cat would watch a mouse. “You didn’t seem to want to talk when your thugs left me for dead in that ditch. Where was it again, Thor?”

“Tarrytown,” Thor says, his voice in a deep growl.

“Tarrytown!” Loki exclaims. He has his gun raised again, this time toward Pierce. “Of all of the places to die. My brother wasn’t very happy about that, were you, Thor?”

“You left my baby brother to die, Pierce,” Thor says and steps forward. Pierce stumbles again and this time finds himself crowded by the red-bearded giant.

“That was—a misunderstanding,” Pierce says, sweating. His eyes dart around the garage, but now his men are surrounded too, cowering. The woman, in particular, is having a great time making a very large man crumble with fear.

“Listen, we can come to an agreement. We have a gauntlet—”

“No,” Loki says, lightly. “I think, we have a gauntlet.”

Steve, arms around Bucky, watches as Bucky shifts away from him, takes the shoulder bag off and tosses it to the blond with the forked beard.

“See?” Loki says. He tilts his head and he _smiles_.

Pierce—his knees give out then. He buckles to the ground.

“I’ll give you anything,” Alexander Pierce begs. “You want money? I’ll give you money. You want the police force? I’ll get you the entire police force! _I can give you anything you want!_ ”

“Hm,” Loki says, aims his gun at Pierce’s shoulder, and fires. Pierce screams as blood spills across the top. “Sad.”

“Take your men and go, Captain,” Thor says then, turning his intense gaze from his brother and Pierce to Steve and Bucky. “What will happen here won’t be pretty. I would rather you didn’t watch.”

Bucky stirs then, hand to Steve’s face.

“I can drive,” he says, voice a little hoarse.

“Buck—” Steve starts, but Bucky shakes his head.

“Get the others,” Bucky says. “Get in the car.”

Behind them, Pierce starts begging.

“Bucky,” Steve tries again and this time Bucky is less kind.

“Get in the _fucking car_ , Steve. I’m the getaway driver,” Bucky Barnes says and digs the keys to the Mustang out of Steve’s khakis.

///

Bucky’s hands barely shake as he turns the ignition on.

“We waiting for the right song this time, Cyborg?” Tony asks through gritted teeth, in the back. His brow is slick with sweat, his skin pale and clammy. Sam’s helped him tear off the bottom half of his shirt and wrap his shoulder in it. It’s nearly soaked through with red now, but it’ll hold until they get Tony back to HQ or, maybe, to a hospital.

Bucky takes in a breath, a ringing in his ears.

He backs out of the spot.

“Not this time, Stark,” Bucky says.

He doesn’t wait for the right beat or even the right moment. There is no right beat or right moment for something like this. Behind them, there are more shots. Next to him, Steve lets out a rattling breath, deep from his gut. He slides a shaky hand onto Bucky’s thigh and squeezes.

Bucky adjusts the mirror and drives.

[ . . . ]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I HOPE THAT WAS FUN TO READ BC I WAS TOO PLEASED WITH THAT "TWIST."


	10. [ epilogue ]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s done the crimes, so he has to be gay, now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One for the road.

**[ epilogue; _one week later_ ]**

“Feels kind of weird draining a dead guy’s accounts,” Bruce says, staring at his screen. There’s some complicated matrix displayed across the three different screens, green code scrolling from left to right, and numbers that keep changing in different boxes.

There’s only a slightly awkward pause at that. Just a few days ago, Alexander Pierce’s body had been found in his multi-billion dollar apartment. Suicide, the news had reported.

“I’m going to be honest,” Sam says, leaning over Bruce’s shoulder. “I don’t feel too bad about it.”

All beginnings must come to an end and so, too, do all jobs. Sometimes, so too, do even the best of crews.

“Give it a minute,” Bruce says. The numbers keep changing, like spinning squares on a slot machine. With a satisfied sigh, he turns off the monitor and stands up.

Sure enough, sixty seconds later, everyone’s watch goes off.

There’s a low whistle, from either Clint or Natasha, or maybe both.

“Should I retire?” Clint asks, looking up eagerly. “This is enough for—”

“What are you going to do in retirement, Barton?” Natasha asks. She’s sitting on her usual metal table, her hair in a braid again. Clint, surprisingly, or not surprisingly, is next to her. He leans his head into her shoulder and she obliges him with a head scratch.

“Maybe I’ll buy a farm,” he muses. “A big plot of land upstate.”

“What are you going to do on a farm?” Natasha Romanoff, slow to smile and rare to laugh, almost sounds amused.

“Blow things up,” Clint grins. “And raise cows.”

There’s a pause and Natasha rewards him with another head scratch. And then, surprisingly, what looks like a fond kiss.

“How long was I out?” Tony complains. He has his arm in a sling, which is both unwieldy for him and hilariously old fashioned. He’s complained about it once every four minutes since the hospital put him in it. “A guy gets shot, passes out for a little while _from blood loss_ , I might add, and suddenly everyone’s fucking everyone and _no one_ is fucking _him_.”

There is another, awkward pause.

“I don’t know how to tell you that no one wants to do that,” Bucky is the one to say.

There’s a room full of snickers, at Tony’s expense, which Tony takes grave offense to. Or, at least, he turns to bicker with Bucky, but Bucky is too busy snaking an arm around Steve’s waist and leaning his chin on top of Steve’s shoulder.

This is a very comfortable place for him. Not because Steve’s shoulder is soft and certainly not because the enormously tall and well-built asshole has a particularly malleable torso, but because Bucky likes pressing himself into him and drinking up his warmth.

He presses a kiss to the back of Steve’s neck on purpose, mostly because he knows it’ll make Steve blush and Tony and Sam go apoplectic with indignation. Or something. Anyway, he’s wearing his rainbow ombre bomber jacket with a soft, white crop top underneath that says _be gay, do crimes_ and he’s done the crimes, so he has to be gay, now.

“Bucky,” Steve murmurs and Bucky grins wildly.

Sam lets out a much-aggrieved sigh.

“What about you?” Natasha says, turning from Clint to Steve. “Can’t be Captain if there’s no team to be Captain of.”

Steve looks around the warehouse then. Bucky can’t read his mind, but he can read his body language. It’s not quite tense, but not quite relaxed. All of the lines of Steve Rogers says he’s made a decision, but he doesn’t know if it’s the right one.

“We can keep going,” Natasha says. “But we don’t have to.”

“Are we disbanding?” Tony interjects. Standing over his favorite bench, scattered with small pieces of abandoned and dismantled StarkTech, he waves his arms around and then winces when his injured arm gets caught up in the process. “I didn’t agree to this. Again, I wasn’t out _that_ long.”

Bucky’s been wondering that too, he supposes.

Maybe they all have been.

They look to Steve.

He looks down at his hands. When he looks up, it’s with a small smile.

“I don’t know. I was thinking someone else could be Captain for a while,” he says. He looks at Sam, eyebrow raised, and Sam puts his hands up.

“Don’t look at me,” he says. “I follow your lead.”

“Okay,” Steve says, and takes a breath. “I guess what I want is to take a minute for myself. Be a little selfish.”

If Steve was expecting anyone to be disappointed with him, what happens is the opposite. Sam lets out a little breath, like _finally_. Clint grins. Natasha swings her legs under her, looking pleased.

It’s—if not soft, then at least warm.

“You run out of funds, you come back to us,” Tony says, surprisingly. “There’s always more people to steal from and once I get this glove going—”

“ _That fucking glove!_ ” Sam interjects in exasperation and Bucky giggles into Steve’s back. He wraps his arms more firmly around him and feels Steve cover his hands with his own.

He would hate to admit he feels any sort of warmth toward anyone here other than Steve, but he guesses, fundamentally, the knot he feels in his chest can at least be described as: gratitude. That they survived.

And, gun to head: relief. That these specific people—not just any, but _these_ people—were the ones he survived with.

“So what’s next for you, then?” Natasha asks, softly, looking at Steve—and Bucky. “Where do you go now?”

Steve doesn’t answer this time, so it’s left to Bucky to say.

It’s the happiest he’s been to talk, maybe ever.

“We hit the road,” Bucky says. “I’m going to steal the hottest car I can wire and then I’m going to blow Steve on top of it.”

“ _Bucky!_ ” Steve grinds out in mortification and Bucky tips his head back and _cackles_.

“That sounds nice,” Clint says, a bit dreamily. Natasha twines her fingers into the peaks of his fuckboy hair and gives a tug.

“Don’t even think about it, Barton,” she says.

“Aww,” Clint says, sadly.

“What about you?” Steve asks Natasha now.

To everyone’s surprise, she smiles—really, actually smiles.

“I like cows,” she says. “But I also like breaking into things. So I guess we’ll see where the two intersect.”

It’s a bittersweet moment. There’s always the possibility of this, between jobs. One finishes and another one might begin, but it might not. It’s different when the whole structure collapses around their shoulders. LEVIATHAN was a lot of things, but it had gathered a group of like-minded, reckless idiots and forced them to become something more than just people put together to commit crimes.

Bucky thinks, okay, maybe he’ll miss this. Maybe he’ll miss _them_ —the people in this room. His people.

“Nothing stopping us from coming back together,” Sam says. He’s not wearing any chain, any piece of jewelry today. He’s dressed down, in a leather bomber jacket. He’s just Sam Wilson, a guy who always has your six.

“That’s right,” Tony says. He has something in his hands. One by one, he tosses a new watch to each person. The bands are gold. Sam smiles. “I don’t expect any of you to start going straight on me now, so take these and when you’re ready—you know who to call.”

Bucky frowns at the watch. It doesn’t go with his silver, metal arm. Still, he and Sam compare their new modified StarkTech watches and grin.

“Don’t get caught,” Natasha says, reaching up to give Steve a hug. When he hugs her, she is, every part of her, engulfed. “And stay in touch.”

“I’ll see you,” Steve says, letting her go. He looks around at the room, everyone quickly dissolving into their usual states of light chaos and general bickering. “We—Bucky and I—will see you soon.”

“We, huh?” Natasha says, with a wry smile. “I guess character development _can_ happen.”

“Steve,” Bucky calls and Steve turns around then, all expectant smile and something warm—like life deals a lot of blows and it’s not always successful criminal enterprises, but sometimes even the bad guys—if that’s what they are, morality is all shades of grey anyway—get a chance to turn and be with the person who makes them happy.

Bucky’s getting sentimental in his old age, but he smiles then too, warm and happy all over.

“I can put my music on it,” Bucky says, happily. “And play it through the comms.”

“That’s great, Buck,” Steve says, smile all over his face. “Show me how.”

Steve comes over to him and Bucky leans into his side. Sam comes over to bicker and so does Natasha and Clint. Tony and Bruce don’t care to be left out together.

Maybe they were all never meant to be together, but that’s not to say they weren’t meant to be together and do the exact things that they did, for the time they did them.

Anyway, Bucky thinks, it’s not so bad, being a part of a team of assholes who couldn’t make a good decision if it meant saving their lives. They were all stupid, impulsive, reckless adrenaline addicts with slightly crazy eyes and more than a small inclination toward moral ambiguity.

But that’s what made them work.

A bunch of like-minded, crazy sons-of-bitches with too much temper and too little brain, Bucky thinks. No wonder they kept getting shot at.

He grins widely and puts on his watch.

Chaos is more fun anyway.

///

“You ready?” Steve asks, with a look Bucky doesn’t trust.

“This wasn’t what I had in mind,” Bucky grumbles. Still, Steve hands him the helmet and he pulls it onto his head without protest.

It’s a day worth killing for, if you were into that sort of thing. Clear blue skies, sun high in the middle, a cool breeze—just chill enough for a leather jacket, but not cold enough to require something more.

Something flutters in Bucky’s chest. It could be feelings, but maybe it’s just nerves.

He narrows his eyes, scraping up every last bit of Steve he can swallow.

“Are you checking me out again, Barnes?” Steve says.

“The view’s free,” Bucky says, popping a bubble.

Steve rolls his eyes and that looks good on him too. He’s good out there—in the field, leading the team, conning people out of codes and money. But he’s good here too—with a leather jacket stretched across his shoulders, in dark denim jeans and a white shirt that’s so thin Bucky can almost see his nipples underneath. The wind stirring his hair, those sky blue eyes watching Bucky with a degree of trust and fondness that’s unheard of among criminals.

His lips curve up when he smiles and Bucky watches it carefully, almost in consternation.

“C’mere,” Steve says, fingers curled into the bottom of Bucky’s jacket and pulls him close. He gets an arm around him and Bucky tries to hold still, even though his first instinct is to squirm away.

“I wanted to drive,” Bucky says, almost petulantly.

Steve laughs and reaches up to pull at a stray curl peeking out from under Bucky’s helmet.

“Let someone else have a chance, Buck,” Steve says.

Bucky hates that. He hates the whole thing, the—smile and the touching and the way Steve’s inflections soften when he says something he means. He hates the way Steve looks at him and he hates the way Steve’s rough palm feels brushing against his cheek. Mostly he hates that he’s probably going to get extremely turned on, seeing how Steve Rogers handles a motorcycle.

“Fuck you,” Bucky says and then winds his arms around Steve’s massive shoulders and kisses him.

They make out against the motorcycle for a while, until Steve is all adorably pink and flushed and his hair is all mussed and Bucky can barely breathe his heart is racing so fast. There’s that kind of adrenaline and there’s this kind. Bucky, he likes both.

He’s never going to tell Steve he loves him. Serves him right, to make Bucky go all weak in the fucking knees and mushy in the fucking head, the absolute bastard.

“Okay, fine,” Bucky relents finally, but only because Steve keeps sneaking his hand up under his shirt and kissing his mouth, which is quite sore and bright red by now. _Bastard_ , Bucky reiterates angrily in his head.

“I’ll make it worth your while,” Steve says, breathlessly.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, seriously. “I said I’d blow you on top of a hot car. But a motorcycle…”

Steve grins—a bright, wicked thing.

Bucky, he unfortunately loves him.

It’s disgusting.

“Like I said,” Steve says, and kisses him one last time. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

He pulls off of Bucky, finally, both of them a little breathless and a lot jelly-like. Then Bucky grabs the spare helmet and shoves it on top of Steve’s head, giggling while he does so. He offers Steve a piece of gum. Steve declines.

Steve gets into the front seat and Bucky climbs on behind him. His arms go all the way around Steve’s waist and he nestles into his back, just where he likes it.

Steve starts the ignition and then, hearts beating fast, wind in their faces, neon lights flickering in the distance, he guns it.

“Gone, baby, gone,” Bucky says with a grin.

That is, at least, until they come back again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you SO much for reading and commenting and coming along for some gay heists with me and these ding dongs. If I haven't heard from you yet--I'd love to hear from you now! In conclusion, Happy Pride and always, always, be gay and do crimes. ♥

**Author's Note:**

> \+ Thank you so much for reading!! If you're enjoying this, let me know. ♥ 
> 
> \+ If you want some neon-noir beats, check out the soundtrack for this fic, the [Time+Wander playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/mechafaux/playlist/5gpW76y0n7D2IJJWnBsc7h?si=-YiFm_lPTxyaQ98AnYTwrg), on Spotify.
> 
> \+ Reblog buckysnowangel's AMAZING neon noir Bucky art [on Tumblr](https://buckysnowangel.tumblr.com/post/185354323840/tomorrow-night-well-go-anywhere-full#notes) or [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/buckysnowangel/status/1133442042196037633) and/or this fic [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/spacerenegades/status/1133435291262423041) or [on Tumblr](https://spacerenegades.tumblr.com/post/185363721708/a-reverse-big-bang-collaboration-between)! ♥ 
> 
> \+ I can be found [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/spacerenegades) and so can [BuckySnowAngel](https://twitter.com/buckysnowangel)! Come join us, let's have a fun time.
> 
> \+ In conclusion: BE GAY AND DO CRIME.


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